Abdul Aziz Mohamad FCJ:

[1] By this motion the respondent, who is an advocate and solicitor, relying on r 137 of the Rules of the Federal 1995, applies to have reviewed and set aside a decision of this Court of 3 March 2004 and another of 13 May 2005. By the latter decision this Court allowed the appeal of the appellants against the decision of the Court of Appeal dismissing the appellants' appeal against the decision of the High Court in favour of the respondent in a defamation action brought by the respondent against the appellants. The earlier decision was a decision granting the appellants leave to appeal to this Court. In para 13 of their written submission the appellants agree, as the respondent contends, that, as reflected in r 137 and as this Court held in Chan Yock Cher v. Chan Teong Peng, [2005] 4 CLJ 29 at 39 c, this Court has inherent powers, in the words of the rule, "to hear any application or to make any order as may be necessary to prevent injustice or to prevent an abuse of the process of the Court" to the extent even of reviewing its own decisions, but the appellants contend that there has been no injustice or abuse of process involved in either of those two decisions. To avoid confusion, from now on we will refer to the respondent as "the plaintiff' and the appellants as "the defendants" and the references to them in extracts from the judgments at the appeal stages of this case will be modified accordingly.

[2] At the outset, we have to say that the question of reviewing the leave decision of 3 March 2004 does not merit consideration and will not be gone into. As for the appeal decision of 13 May 2005 the plaintiff has advanced various grounds to justify its review and setting aside but most of them do not merit consideration and will not be gone into. If the plaintiff succeeds in showing a case for a review of the appeal decision, he wants the defendants' appeal to this Court to be reheard by a differently constituted panel of this Court.

[3] The plaintiff's defamation action arose out of an earlier action in the High Court at Penang in which one Paramasivam a/l Varatharajoo sued one Varlivell alias Vadiveloo s/o Varatharajoo, as the first defendant, and the plaintiff, as the second defendant, for various reliefs in connection with the transfer of Paramasivam's land. 11 September 1991 was the first day of the trial of this earlier action, which will be referred to as "Paramasivam's action". Next day, 12 September, there appeared in the defendants' newspaper, The New Straits Times, relative to the first day of the trial, a report containing statements which became the subject of the plaintiff's defamation action. The statements may be summarized as a claim by Paramasivam that the plaintiff, a lawyer, whose photograph was published with the report, and Varlivell, a trader, had conspired to cheat Paramasivam, an illiterate man and the plaintiff's client, by allowing Paramasivam's land to be transferred to a businessman without his knowledge and permission. The report bore a heading in bold letters: "Lawyer and trader conspired to cheat me, claims driver".

[4] The defendants' only defence was that the report was absolutely privileged by virtue of s 11(1) of the Defamation Act 1957, which, as far as material for the present motion, provides as follows:

(1) A fair and accurate and contemporaneous report of proceedings publicly heard before any Court lawfully exercising judicial authority within Malaysia... shall be absolutely privileged...