PETALING JAYA: All legal eyes will be on Parliament when it sits on June 22 as the august House is expected to take up a constitutional amendment decades in the making: splitting the Attorney General’s (AG) role into two separate offices.
Since 1957, one person has served as both the government’s legal adviser and the Public Prosecutor (PP), deciding who gets charged with a crime and who does not.
Introduced in the Dewan Rakyat by Law and Institutional Reform Minister Datuk Seri Azalina Othman Said, the Constitution (Amendment) (No. 2) Bill 2026 is a landmark piece of legislation proposing to separate the roles of the AG and the PP.
The Bill is currently under review by a parliamentary special select committee.
The proposed amendment will create an independent PP, appointed by the King on the recommendation of a commission.
The Bill, as first tabled, proposed a fixed seven-year term.
After months of cross-party scrutiny and revisions, the Bill now faces its final hurdle – approval from at least two-thirds of the MPs.
Senior lawyer JJ Chan said the concern was not that any particular Attorney General has misused power.
“It is that the structure itself asks one person to do two things that can pull in opposite directions.
“Consider the position of an AG, asked to decide whether to prosecute a member of the government he advises, or a prominent critic of it.
“However honestly that decision is made, one side or the other might suspect the worst. The adviser’s hat casts a shadow over the prosecutor’s decision.
“That is the quiet cost of the current design, not necessarily injustice itself, but the standing suspicion of it.”
Explaining the history behind, Chan said the current system was inherited from the Westminster tradition, where the AG historically combined both functions.
“At independence, in a smaller and simpler government, it was an efficient design: one office, one set of lawyers, one clear line of legal authority.
“But over time, many countries that began with this model concluded that the two hats sat uneasily on one head, and moved to separate them in one form or another.
“Malaysia has debated the same question across different governments and different political eras, without bringing it to a vote as a constitutional amendment, until now,” he said.
Under the proposal, the AG will continue advising the government on matters of law, while the PP will take over the exclusive purview of criminal law and procedures.
Attorney General Tan Sri Mohd Dusuki Mokhtar, during a briefing for parliamentarians on the newly proposed Bill early this year, emphasised that this is to eliminate political influence in criminal matters and prosecutions.
He had explained that the idea is to do away with political influence in the appointment of the PP.
“That is why we didn’t include any role of politicians, including the prime minister, in the proposed Bill. Because we want to ensure they will act fairly and free of political influence,” Dusuki said.
