- Yesterday, Minister of Legal Affairs told to the parliment that the jurisdiction of Legal Aid Bureau(BBG) will be expanded to the extend that the officers can represent to defend offender in a criminal matters.Before this, Legal Aid Bureau only have jurisdiction for mitigation on punisment and cannot represent offender who did not plead guilty.80% of Legal Aid Bureau cases are civil matters mainly on family,accident, harta pusaka and syariah.The idea of expanding this jurisdiction in criminal cases was brought before, in the late 1980's during Legal Aid Bereau Conference by Dato' Mariana as she was then the assistant director of BBG Pahang(now High Court Judge of Selangor).But BBG cannot implemented those idea because lack of man power and limited budget given by the government to BBG.A lot of BBG officers are in the opinion that they cannot represent offenders who didnot plead guilty and asking for trial because of conflict of interest or there will be bias.This is because, the prosecutor are officers from AG chambers and BBG officers are also the same.But in my opinion, if the reason of backlogged cases mainly because of there are no lawyer to represent the accused,then for the sake of justice this shall not be an excuses.The government must take a serious stand to help the people by providing more BBG officers and increase budget for BBG.If not,this will be a mere cosmetic changes. For example in BBG Selangor, we have only 2 legal officer and 2 assisstant officer to cover all cases around selangor.Not only civil cases and mitigation for plead guilty cases,but civil officers also have to handle syariah cases because syariah officers cannot handle their thousand of cases.Since January to Mac 2008(3 months) there are 550 civil cases and 2600 syariah cases handle by BBG Selangor officers and most of them still pending.Now, if the government really want to overcome the backlogged cases in court,they should take other steps beside depending on Legal Aid officers only.Of course one of them is to increase the number of judges in lower court and also increase their assistants.The court also must ensure that they have enough staff to handle all the files,so that there will be no incident happen such as file not found and etc,as this can slower the process in court. Early this year,i met Mr. Kirpal Singh who manage the Selangor BAR,legal aid centre and he told me that there are a lot of young lawyers willing to do criminal cases for the centre.But it is hard for them to take such cases because the payment is too low (around RM300 to 700) per case.This fees is only enough to pay for their court documentation and not include their fuel,food,etc.Therefore,if the government can provide at least RM1000 to 1500 per file to the centre,then there will be more lawyers interested to take cases from the centre and can help to solve the backlogged cases in court.Only one word that i can describe right now, that is we need to CHANGE!