Tun Laila binti Tun Rafaee

On the court record

The reported matters document appellate criminal litigation under the anti-trafficking and anti-smuggling legislation, grounded in Court of Appeal judgments.

Tun Laila binti Tun Rafaee appears in the reported corpus in a group of related Court of Appeal criminal appeals arising from a prosecution under the anti-trafficking legislation, in which several accused were dealt with together. The charge was under section 26B(d) of the Anti-Trafficking in Persons and Anti-Smuggling of Migrants Act 2007 (Akta Anti Pemerdagangan Orang dan Anti Penyeludupan Migran 2007), read together with section 34 of the Penal Code, and the proceedings also engaged section 170 of the Criminal Procedure Code and the framework for the protection of witnesses. She appeared for the respondents across these related appeals.

The subject matter places the case among the more serious offences in the corpus, since human-trafficking prosecutions combine grave charges with special evidentiary and procedural features, including measures to protect vulnerable witnesses. The reference to section 34 indicates that liability was put on the basis of a common intention shared among the accused, so that the case had to be considered against each accused in light of the part he was said to have played.

In the course of the appeals the deputy public prosecutor applied to withdraw an appeal in respect of one of the prosecution witnesses, and the Court recorded that the appeal against that witness was withdrawn accordingly. A thread running through the matter is the conduct of a serious, multi-accused trafficking prosecution on appeal, where the charges, the common-intention basis of liability and the protection of witnesses all shape how the case is argued. The reported work is thus in serious criminal litigation under the anti-trafficking and anti-smuggling legislation, argued before the Court of Appeal of Malaysia in appeals concerning several accused tried together. These are among the gravest offences the corpus records, and the appeals show how the common-intention basis of liability and the special protections for witnesses shape both the presentation and the review of such a case, with the position of each accused turning on the part he was found to have played in the joint enterprise.