Chapter 1 – Report of the Policy, Law and Complaints Group Malaysia as a State Party of the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) was involved significantly in the drafting of the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration and was a signatory to the Declaration. Article 14 provides that no person should be subject to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. The Commission was of the opinion that a series of RTDs should be held to discuss further the possibility of accession to the Convention and to look at laws and policies which may support accession to the said Convention. Pursuant to this, three RTDs with relevant stakeholders were held in Sabah, Kuala Lumpur, and Sarawak. The objectives of the RTDs were as follows: (i) To engage with the Islamic religious bodies in order to discuss issues regarding torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment in the country from the Islamic perspective, and also to review the compatibility between the punishment under Syariah laws and provisions of the CAT; (ii) To consider, as substitutes to corporal punishment, alternative sentencing that can be more effective in achieving crime prevention; and (iii) To formulate views and recommendations that can be forwarded to the Government as recommendations. Recommendations and conclusions from the RTDs can be summarised as follows: (i) International customary law dictates that a country has to take measures to prevent and prohibit torture, even without accession to the CAT. Hence, the Government should uphold the principle of the prohibition against torture by taking necessary measures in eliminating torture; (ii) The imposition of the death penalty in the country per se does not amount to torture under the CAT, thus it should not be seen as a hindrance in acceding to the Convention; (iii) To demonstrate disapproval against torture, the Government must remove reservations to articles under other international instruments that prohibit torture, such as Article 37 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and also Article 15 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD); (iv) The Government must look into alternative forms of punishment that do not amount to torture as defined under the CAT. For example, whipping sentences for adult offenders should be replaced with community services; (v) The initiative by the Prison Department to find alternatives to imprisonment by invoking the Compulsory Attendance Act 1954 must be commended as a positive step to reduce overcrowding in prisons and promote positive rehabilitation of the offenders; 53 BOOK-ANR2016-01-latest.indb 53 08/04/2016 3:32 PM