This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on November 11, 2015.

KUALA LUMPUR: Pakatan Harapan is unperturbed by the possibility of PAS tabling a private member’s bill on hudud in Dewan Rakyat following the Kuala Lumpur High Court’s move to strike out a suit to stop the party from enacting the Islamic penal code in the state of Kelantan.

Shrugging off the matter, DAP parliamentary whip Anthony Loke said recent history showed that such attempts had come to naught.

Chances of the hudud bill coming up for debate would be quite slim, Loke said, as seen from the attempts made by PAS president Datuk Seri Abdul Hadi Awang, who tried twice before in the Dewan Rakyat sitting of April and June this year.

Hadi has submitted a notice to table his private member’s bill to amend the Syariah Courts (Criminal Jurisdiction) Act 1965, which would enable hudud to be implemented in the east coast state.

The Kelantan legislature in March unanimously passed amendments to the state’s Syariah Criminal Code II 1993 (Amendment 2015), but the Islamic penal code cannot be enforced until a federal law is changed.

Both billls by Hadi appeared at the tail end of the Dewan Rakyat’s Order Papers, but failed to come up for debate as convention dictates that government business takes priority and has to be finished first.

“Of course technically, a private member’s bill on hudud can still be tabled but everyone knows the outcome will be the same. Namely, it will be listed in the Order Paper but will not be up for debate, like what happened the last two times.

“I will be very surprised if the government allows it,” Loke told The Malaysian Insider yesterday.

Concurring with Loke, PKR vice-president Chua Tian Chang said any attempt by PAS to table the bill again would be an “academic exercise”.

“The bill will never get past the Speaker. It will neither be debated nor voted upon,” the Batu member of parliament, better known as Tian Chua, said in a text message yesterday. — The Malaysian Insider