Iqbal Harith Liang bin Danial Liang

On the court record

Iqbal Harith Liang bin Danial Liang appears in the corpus in civil litigation with a strong public-law and civil-Syariah dimension, argued in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) and the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan). One Court of Appeal matter, appearing for the respondent, concerned an allegation of a real danger of bias on the part of the trial court arising from findings and statements in a High Court judge's grounds of judgment, and an application to strike out under Order 18 rule 19(1) of the Rules of Court 2012. A second matter, in the High Court and appearing for the defendant, was a striking-out application under Order 18 rule 19(1)(b) and (d) that opened onto a significant jurisdictional question: whether a claim for the revocation of probate and the administration of an estate fell within the civil High Court's jurisdiction or within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Syariah Court under Article 121(1A) of the Federal Constitution, where the issue of a conversion to Islam and the validity of a will executed before that conversion arose — and whether the conversion question was merely incidental or collateral to the estate dispute. A third matter, in the High Court and appearing for the applicant, engaged the same civil-Syariah boundary from the other direction, turning on whether the remedy- or relief-based approach or the subject-matter approach was determinative of the application, and on the proper interpretation of section 46(2)(b)(x) of the relevant enactment, in particular whether the 'by implication' approach or the 'specific statutory conferment' approach should govern the reach of the Syariah High Court's jurisdiction. These matters illustrate how questions of religious status and conversion, though they may appear incidental to a civil dispute over an estate or a right, can determine which court has authority to decide the matter at all, and how the competing interpretive approaches to the enabling enactments shape that outcome. Across the appearances the practice is concentrated on the demarcation of jurisdiction between the civil and Syariah courts, and on the striking-out mechanism by which that boundary is often tested at an early stage.