Federal Court (Mahkamah Persekutuan)

What this court decides

The Federal Court corpus is the site's source of binding apex-level authority — leave applications, rule 137 reviews, constitutional questions and final criminal appeals — read for principle rather than fact.

The Federal Court (Mahkamah Persekutuan) sits at the apex of the Malaysian judicial hierarchy, and the judgments in this collection reflect that final-court role. The matters it decides are, in the main, questions of law of general importance rather than fresh findings of fact: applications for leave to appeal, appeals brought after leave has been granted, and the court's own narrow power of review. A recurring category is the review application under rule 137 Kaedah-Kaedah Mahkamah Persekutuan (rule 137 of the Rules of the Federal Court) — the inherent jurisdiction a party invokes to reopen a decision of the court itself — together with objections taken under the Akta Mahkamah Kehakiman 1964 (Courts of Judicature Act 1964), such as an application under subsection 97(4) to discharge an order made by a single judge.

Constitutional questions feature more prominently here than in the courts below: the Federal Court is where the interpretation of the Federal Constitution is settled, and the collection includes matters ranging from the right of illegitimate children to inherit under the law of intestacy to challenges engaging fundamental liberties. Alongside these sit the apex-level criminal appeals — including appeals against conviction and sentence in prosecutions under seksyen 302 Kanun Keseksaan (section 302 of the Penal Code — murder) and under seksyen 39B(1)(a) Akta Dadah Berbahaya 1952 (section 39B(1)(a) of the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952) — and civil questions of continuing significance, such as the threshold for a Fortuna injunction where the underlying debt is subject to an arbitration clause.

Because the court sits in panels, several members recur across the reported decisions; among the judges appearing most often in this collection are Nallini Pathmanathan, Azahar bin Mohamed, Zabariah binti Mohd Yusof and Abdul Rahman bin Sebli. The judgments here read as statements of principle that bind the courts beneath them, rather than as first-instance determinations of disputed evidence.