Emergency (Public Order and Crime Prevention) Ordinance

The Emergency (Public Order and Crime Prevention) Ordinance, commonly abbreviated as the Emergency Ordinance (EO), is a Malaysian law whose most well-known provision allows for indefinite detention without trial. The Emergency Ordinance was enacted by the National Operations Council led by Tun Abdul Razak as part of the state of emergency declared following the May 13 race riots. As the state of emergency has never been revoked to the present day, the Emergency Ordinance remains in force.

The Ordinance has been regularly used to detain those deemed to be subversive by the government, and is in fact used far more frequently than the Internal Security Act. Though figures for those detained under the EO are not released by the government, Human Rights Watch estimated there to be 712 such detainees in 2005.^[1]

A recent use of the Emergency Ordinance was in June 2011, to detain indefinitely 6 members of Parti Sosialis Malaysia, including Sungai Siput Member of Parliament Dr. Michael Jeyakumar Devaraj, due to their support for the Bersih 2.0 rally for electoral reform. These 6 people have been collectively called the Emergency Ordinance 6, or EO6. As of July, all 6 remained under detention, and looked likely to remain so for another two years.^[2] The first Occupy Dataran was planned to coincided with an EO6 vigil. When the EO6 were released on 29 July,^[3] the first official KL People's Assembly meeting was postponed until the following Saturday, 6 August.^[4]

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