Union of Myanmar – the drafting of which actually started in 1993 – was enacted
and approved by a referendum, allowing multiparty elections but reserving a
quarter of the seats in each house of parliament for the military. There have been
signs of political liberalisation more recently, with the release of Aung San Suu Kyi
from house arrest in 2010 , and she and her party securing parliamentary seats in the
2012 by-elections. Thus Myanmar has moved from a state without even a ‘nominal’
or ‘semantic’ constitution (in Loewenstein’s sense) to the beginnings of HC.
Malyasia. Like Burma, Malaysia also formed part of the British Empire in Asia,
but its constitutional path after independence was much more stable and relatively
successful. Shortly before Malaya acquired independence in 1957 , a general election
was held in 1955 at which the Alliance led by the United Malays National Organisa-
tion (UMNO) first came to power. Malaya’s independence constitution was drafted
by a commission led by Lord Reid from Britain, and provided for a British-style
parliamentary system, a federal structure and a constitutional monarchy. In 1963 ,
the Federation of Malaysia was formed by the addition of three new states to the
Federation of Malaya. (One of them, Singapore, was ejected from the federation in
1965 .) The Alliance, subsequently known as Barisan Nasional (BN), has been
continuously in power since independence through victories in parliamentary
elections, although, as emphasised by Lee in his chapter in this volume, the
opposition made considerable gains in the 2008 election (and subsequently in the
2013 election) which led to BN losing the two-thirds parliamentary majority that is
required for any constitutional amendment. Since the independence constitution
was made, fifty amendments have been introduced, the trend of which was to
concentrate more power on the executive. A watershed event in Malaysian history
was the 1969 racial riots which led to a declaration of emergency and curtailment of
civil liberties. Under the leadership of Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who served as prime
minister for successive terms from 1981 to 2003 , Malaysia made good progress in
economic development, but judicial independence suffered a severe blow in 1988
when the Lord President and two other Supreme Court judges were removed. Lee
in his chapter points out that even today, public confidence in the judiciary has not
been completely restored. He also discusses the politics of democratisation and
Islamisation, and the role of the hereditary Malay rulers. There seems to be at least a
moderate DCA in Malaysia. Constitutional and political practices in Malaysia may
be classified as constituting HC or as being very close to GC, depending on how
much weight one attaches to civil liberties, judicial independence and transfer of
power as an electoral outcome.
Singapore. There are considerable similarities between the constitutional
trajectories of Malaysia and Singapore; the latter’s constitutional practices have
been described by Thio as ‘communitarian constitutionalism’
84
or ‘illiberal
(^84) See Thio’s chapter in this volume.