Explained: Can a person be charged in a Malaysian hospital instead of a courtroom?

Social Issues & Public Opinion Calculating...

Kritik
17 Aug 2026
41
SubCategory | Public Sentiment

Explained: Can a person be charged in a Malaysian hospital instead of a courtroom?

By Ida Lim

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 17 — Did you know that an accused person can be charged or face trial while hospitalised in Malaysia, instead of waiting for them to appear in court?

Here’s what criminal lawyers told Malay Mail about when and why this can happen:

1. Can an accused person be charged in a hospital ward?

Short answer: Yes.

Senior criminal lawyer Datuk N. Sivananthan confirmed this can be done.

“Yes, the ward can be declared as open court and the proceedings can take place as if one was in the actual court concerned,” he said.

Besides hospital wards, Sivananthan said a person could also be charged at other locations outside court.

“You can declare any place as an open court.”

He cited three legal provisions that enable this: Section 7 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CPC), and Sections 15 and 15A of the Courts of Judicature Act (CJA).

Sections 7 and 15 enable “the place” where any court is held for a criminal case to be treated as an “open and public court” where the public generally may have access, while Section 15A further enables court proceedings to be conducted online.

Based on Section 15, Sivananthan said it is possible for a court to decide to charge someone outside a courtroom while disallowing public access to the hospital ward by deciding that the matter is “in camera” or to be held privately.

Section 15 states that the court can decide to hear a case “in camera” for reasons such as the interests of justice, public safety, public security or propriety.

Former Malaysian Bar president Salim Bashir Bhaskaran said an accused would in “ordinary circumstances” be charged in a courtroom, but the Subordinate Courts Act gives magistrates and Sessions Court judges the power to declare “an open space or confined areas like hospitals, nursing homes” or police stations or prisons as a court.

Section 76(3) of the Subordinate Courts Act states that a Magistrates’ Court can be held at any other place if there is a need to do so, while Section 59(4) similarly says a Sessions Court can be held at any other place if the necessity arises.

Criminal lawyer Rajsurian Pillai said an accused person can be charged at a physical location other than the usual courtroom, including at a hospital.

“This has happened on previous occasions in Malaysia. Therefore, there is nothing inherently irregular about a hospital being the physical venue where a charging proceeding takes place,” he told Malay Mail, adding that court proceedings before judges would not be invalid just because they are held outside a courtroom.

He said this is consistent with Sections 173(a) and 178(1) of the CPC, which require an accused person to appear or be brought before a magistrate or High Court judge for the charge to be read and explained before a plea is recorded.

“Neither provision makes the physical courtroom itself the essential requirement.”

“Accordingly, where an accused is hospitalised or otherwise physically unable to attend the usual courtroom, the court may, where appropriate, conduct the relevant proceedings at another location, taking into account matters such as the accused’s medical condition, the urgency and circumstances of the case, and the interests of justice,” he said, noting that this would be determined on a case-by-case basis.

He stressed that the important point is that a High Court judge or judicial officer — a Sessions Court judge or magistrate — is conducting the proceedings, and that the usual procedural and legal safeguards for criminal cases are complied with during proceedings held outside the courtroom.

2. Prosecution has to apply to charge an accused in hospital

To have an accused person charged in a hospital ward, Sivananthan said the prosecution would have to apply to the judge where the charge is registered.

He noted that the accused person’s defence lawyers “cannot object unless the accused is not fit enough to understand the proceedings”.

He said police would check with doctors in advance on the accused person’s health condition before the judge decides whether to have the charges read out in the hospital ward.

If the court agrees to have the accused charged in the hospital ward, the relevant equipment to record the proceedings and personnel, including court police and court staff, would have to be present in the ward, he said.

3. What reasons might result in a person being charged in a hospital?

When asked what reasons the prosecution might use to apply for a person to be charged in a hospital, Sivananthan said:

“If a charge keeps getting delayed because the accused is constantly in hospital for one reason or the other.”

Salim said the prosecution would try to ask the court to consider charging an accused person in hospital when there is an “exceptional situation of need”, adding that this “is subjective and varies based on an urgency of a matter, and is to avoid unnecessary delays due to health conditions of the accused”.

Salim said the “judge or magistrate will assess the request from prosecution primarily based on the accused’s health conditions and advice from health officers”.

4. What happens when a person is charged in a hospital ward?

If carried out in a hospital, Salim said the procedure would be “the same” as an ordinary court process, where an interpreter would read out the charge to an accused person who is conscious, and the nature and consequences of pleading guilty or not guilty must be explained before the person’s plea is recorded.

Sivananthan said the judge has to be at the hospital ward, declare it an open court, and proceed to have the charge read out, the plea recorded and the bail amount set if bail is granted.

“The ward must allow for access by lawyers and the public which is a requirement of an open court.”

He said police would then have to be on standby to guard the accused until bail is paid, or ensure that the accused is taken into custody once discharged from hospital if no bail is given.

5. What about remand and trials? Can they happen in hospitals too?

Short answer: Yes.

Rajsurian said remand proceedings and trials can take place physically outside the conventional courtroom, noting that remand proceedings could, for example, take place in mobile courts.

Rajsurian said he had represented clients in remand proceedings before magistrates at police lock-ups, halls at district police headquarters and hospitals.

Salim said Section 117 of the CPC “allows remand proceedings to take place at any locations before a magistrate”, as Section 117 does not mention the word “court” and only requires the accused to be brought before magistrates.

Based on Sections 7, 15 and 15A, Sivananthan also said both remand proceedings and trials can take place outside court by having such places declared an open court.

But while saying trials can “in theory” take place in hospitals, Sivananthan said this is “unlikely as there would be an issue whether the accused person can understand what is going on depending on his health condition”.

“That would also apply to a person being charged. The accused must be able to understand the charge and to follow proceedings as the case may be,” he said.

6. Yes, it can be done, but usually as a last resort

Salim said “conducting trials in hospitals should be the last resort”, as declaring hospitals as courts and holding trials there may prevent the public from having access to the hospital’s facilities “due to constraint of space or security reasons”.

Sivananthan said charging an accused outside the courtroom “has to be resorted to as a last resort”, as it is difficult due to reasons such as convenience, staff movement, police assignments and security at any other location.

Compared to the past, when everything in court proceedings was written down by hand, Malaysia’s courts now use a digital recording and voice-to-text transcription system, meaning that conducting proceedings elsewhere would be difficult, he said.

Pointing out that hospitals do not have courtroom facilities such as video recorders and microphones, Rajsurian said court proceedings would only be held at hospitals for “very urgent” cases where there are no other options.

For example, an accused would have to be urgently charged at the hospital during the police’s investigation period if it involved a drug trafficking offence under Section 39B of the Dangerous Drugs Act, which can be punishable with death or whipping and life imprisonment, Rajsurian said.

No bail can be given for a Section 39B offence as it involves a possible death penalty, which means the accused cannot be released and would have to be detained while waiting for the trial to be completed.

On August 7, initial news reports indicated that former prime minister Datuk Seri Ismail Sabri Yaakob could be charged at the National Heart Institute (IJN), where he had been hospitalised since the day before.

The Sessions Court allowed his case to be postponed to August 27 after his lawyers requested the postponement due to his pacemaker surgery for abnormal heart rhythm that afternoon. The prosecution did not object due to humanitarian reasons.

Four in-real-life cases

Based on the Malaysian Judiciary’s 2016 Yearbook, Suadin @ Shuhaiddin Langkab was admitted to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, before a court hearing. However, the Court of Appeal on September 23, 2016 decided to proceed with hearing his appeal against his two corruption convictions as the case had been postponed too many times.

This was after the hospital’s medical officers confirmed that Suadin was fit to attend the court hearing, despite his illness. The appeal hearing was carried out under medical supervision after the Court of Appeal declared the hospital ward an open court under Section 7 of the CPC.

In another case, a corruption charge was read to senior immigration officer Zulkifly Abd Za’Par before a Sessions Court judge at a hospital in Shah Alam on December 22, 2020, following the prosecution’s request to charge him there while he was being treated for high blood pressure and heart disease.

He had previously been unable to attend an earlier court proceeding on December 11 as he was receiving medical treatment.

On January 11, 2021, Zulkifly was charged at a private hospital in Johor Bahru, where he was being treated for high blood pressure, with 21 counts of accepting RM56,500 in bribes read out to him before another Sessions Court judge.

On May 6, 2025, 28-year-old beggar Mohamad Fauzan Adib Abd Aziz was charged in a ward at Shah Alam Hospital, where he was receiving medical treatment for seizures. News reports stated that he nodded to indicate he understood the charge — of allegedly murdering a fellow beggar — read out to him before a magistrate in closed-door proceedings.

On January 9, 2026, Yeoh Hock Sun, 63, pleaded not guilty to five charges over an explosion involving an improvised explosive device (IED) in Nilai, with the charges read out to him before a Sessions Court judge in closed-door proceedings at Hospital Tuanku Jaafar in Seremban, where he was reportedly being treated for injuries from the explosion.

Yeoh’s February 12 case mention was postponed as he was in critical condition. He was pronounced dead on February 27 at Hospital Kuala Lumpur due to refractory shock.

Source: explained-can-a-person-be-charged-in-a-malaysian-hospital-instead-of-a-courtroom/231271

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official stance of Kritik.com.my. As an open platform, we welcome diverse perspectives, but the accuracy and integrity of contributed content remain the responsibility of the individual writer. Readers are encouraged to critically evaluate the information presented.