JUDGMENT

Mr J Ong Hock Thye, in the course of his judgment, reviewed a number of decisions of Courts of Malaysia and India (where the Indian Evidence Act is in similar terms) which disclosed a considerable variety of judicial opinion as to the degree of certainty in the non-existence of a fact which must be induced in the mind of the Court to entitle a defendant to an acquittal where a statute expressly imposes upon him the onus of proving that it does not exist. It was because of these differences of opinion that special leave to appeal was granted.

In Malaysia, as in India, the law of evidence has been embodied in a statutory code: the Evidence Ordinance. In so far as any part of the law relating to evidence is expressly dealt with by that Ordinance the Courts in Malaysia must give effect to the relevant provisions of the Ordinance whether or not they differ from the common law rule of evidence as applied by the English Courts. But no enactment can be fully comprehensive. It takes its place as part of the general corpus of the law. It is intended to be construed by lawyers, and upon matters about which it is silent or fails to be explicit it is to be presumed that it was not the