1. ) NAVARRAJ A/L RAVICHANDRAN 2. ) JAYA KUMAR A/L KATHIRVEL v Pendakwa Raya

Case Significance

Illustrates the demarcation between offences that engage the SOSMA regime and those that do not: an offence under section 124K of the Penal Code falls outside SOSMA, so the special measures and mandatory High Court trial do not apply and the matter belongs in the Sessions Court.

This High Court decision at Johor Bahru concerns a criminal revision addressing whether an offence under section 124K of the Penal Code falls within the special regime of the Security Offences (Special Measures) Act 2012 (SOSMA), and, consequently, which court has jurisdiction to try it. The applicants had been charged in the Sessions Court under section 124K of the Penal Code (sabotage), read with section 34, and sought revision on two principal grounds: that section 124K falls outside the scope and purpose of SOSMA, whose primary object was to counter the threat of terrorism; and that if the offence were subject to SOSMA, it would fall to be tried in the High Court, not the Sessions Court, because section 12 of SOSMA requires all security offences to be tried by the High Court. Because the applicants are natural persons named only as parties, this analysis refers to them by role.

The tension in the case arose because the two grounds pulled in opposite directions on the question of forum. If SOSMA applied, section 12 mandated trial in the High Court; if it did not apply, the ordinary rules of jurisdiction governed. The court resolved the question by holding that SOSMA does not apply to an offence under section 124K of the Penal Code — here, sabotage directed at water services — because that offence is referable to Article 149(1)(e) of the Federal Constitution rather than to the terrorism-focused security offences that SOSMA was enacted to address.

Having concluded that SOSMA did not apply, the court held that the section 124K offence could not be tried in the High Court, and that the appropriate course, consistent with Nathan Rajandran v PP — where a case was transferred from the High Court to the Sessions Court — was for the like transfer to be effected for the applicants. The judgment is a useful illustration of the careful demarcation between offences that engage the SOSMA regime and those that do not, and of the jurisdictional consequences that follow: the special measures and High Court trial mandated by SOSMA are confined to the security offences the Act actually covers.