1. ) NORAN BINTI ABU BAKAR SEDIK 2. ) Abidin @ Azlan Bin Ismail v PENGARAH TANAH DAN GALIAN WILAYAH PERSEKUTUAN, KUALA LUMPUR

Case Significance

Illustrates the difficulty of seeking judicial review of an unreasoned administrative decision: at the leave stage the applicant must frame an arguable case without the decision-maker's reasoning, and the authority's silence in the face of a request for reasons is itself a feature the court weighs in deciding whether to grant leave to proceed.

This High Court decision concerns an application for leave to commence judicial review of a decision of the Director of Lands and Mines for the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur, where the decision-maker gave no reasons and did not respond to a request for them. The applicants are natural persons referred to here by their roles; the respondent is the Director of Lands and Mines, a public decision-maker named as an institution. The applicants sought leave to pursue certiorari and declaratory relief in respect of the impugned decision.

The distinctive feature of the case, reflected in the catchwords, is the absence of reasons. There were "no reasons for [the] decision to be reviewed", the applicants had made an "application for reasons", and there was "no response from [the] decision maker". This raises a recurring problem in administrative law: how an aggrieved party is to mount a challenge, and how the court is to assess arguability at the leave stage, when the authority has neither explained its decision nor answered a request to do so.

At the leave stage the court's task is to determine whether the application discloses an arguable case fit for fuller consideration at a substantive hearing — a comparatively low threshold designed to filter out unarguable or frivolous claims while allowing genuine grievances to proceed. Where a decision is unreasoned and the decision-maker is silent in the face of a request for reasons, the questions that naturally arise include whether the silence itself supports an inference adverse to the decision, and whether the applicant can nonetheless demonstrate an arguable ground for review.

The judgment is a useful illustration of the difficulties that attend judicial review of an unreasoned administrative decision: the applicant faces the challenge of framing an arguable case without the benefit of the decision-maker's reasoning, and the absence of any response to a request for reasons is itself a feature the court must weigh in deciding whether to grant leave to proceed.