Hazza Khalid, Suraya & Partners

On the court record

Hazza Khalid, Suraya & Partners appears in the reported judgments as a criminal-litigation practice, working entirely in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) and appearing most often as counsel for appellants and for the accused. Its corpus is defined by criminal law, and a distinctive concentration of its work concerns corruption: prosecutions for soliciting gratification under section 16(a)(B) of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission Act 2009, argued across a group of related matters involving several accused. The recurring questions in these matters are whether the ingredients of the offence — that a gratification was corruptly solicited as an inducement — were established, and how the statutory presumptions of corruption operate once the solicitation or receipt is proved. The firm's work proceeds through full trials (bicara penuh) and turns on whether the prosecution established a prima facie case at the close of its evidence and, ultimately, proof beyond reasonable doubt. Its engagement with the Criminal Procedure Code (Kanun Tatacara Jenayah) runs through this work, governing the conduct of the trial and the points at which the sufficiency of the evidence is tested. Because it appears so consistently on the defence side of serious corruption prosecutions, the firm occupies a position that comparatively few practices in the corpus fill, defending individuals against charges brought by the anti-corruption authorities where the reversed evidential burden and the statutory presumptions make the defence particularly demanding. The concentration of its matters in this single, difficult field marks it as a criminal-defence practice with a recognisable specialism rather than a general litigator, and its corpus is in effect a record of how corruption charges under the 2009 Act are contested at trial. Acting for those accused of soliciting or accepting gratification, the firm's work engages the elements, presumptions and procedural safeguards peculiar to anti-corruption prosecutions, and its consistent appearance across a cluster of related matters suggests a practice trusted with the defence of complex, multi-accused corruption trials in which the evidence and the statutory presumptions must be met point by point.