BEING a bit busy, I had thought I might skip a The Fiji Times column this week.

That was until I saw yesterday’s The Fiji Times quoting Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum. He was berating the lawyers in member of Parliament Niko Nawaikula’s court case.

According to Mr Sayed-Khaiyum, the lawyers in the case (which include his own staff) put forward terrible legal arguments.

This led the Court of Disputed Returns to issue what I assume Mr Sayed-Khaiyum considers a terrible judgment.

Some of us may recall Mr Nawaikula’s case. Still, with so much happening – universities being attacked for corruption, strange tax laws popping up out of nowhere, doctors being arrested for saying what they think, etc – we may already have forgotten.

Mr Nawaikula was registered on the electoral roll using the name we all know him by – Niko Nawaikula. It turns out that this is not the name on his birth certificate.

So the Supervisor of Elections, interpreting an electoral law in a particular way, issued him a notice. Apparently unhappy with Mr Nawaikula’s answer, the Supervisor then struck him off the electoral roll. This caused Mr Nawaikula to lose his parliamentary seat.

Mr Nawaikula took his case to court.

The court accepted Mr Nawaikula’s basic argument. Yes, the court said. Yes, you can be registered on the electoral roll using a name that is not on your birth certificate.

Now, Mr Sayed-Khaiyum appears to say, because of this terrible judgment, all kinds of terrible people are going to be able to go out and register themselves twice on the electoral roll. And this will lead to terrible and fraudulent elections.

Fraudsters everywhere Mr Sayed-Khaiyum appears to think that there is a throng of terrible people just waiting to rush out and register themselves twice on the electoral roll.

Put another way, he seems to think that they are all just waiting to rush out and create proof in writing that they have committed a criminal fraud on the Fiji electoral system.

So, Mr Sayed-Khaiyum says, all these terrible potentially fraudulent people must be prevented from succumbing to temptation.

First, this doesn’t suggest he has much faith in the electoral registration process that his own Electoral Act has created.

Second, there are plenty of checks and balances in even the most basic electoral system to prevent a person voting more than once (which is, after all, the aim of all this).

This ends, ultimately, with the familiar dob of black ink on your fingernail as you leave the polls. You are a marked man (or woman) at that point.

But, Mr Sayed-Khaiyum appears to say, these possibly terrible fraudulent people must only be registered on the electoral roll under their birth certificate names.

Otherwise, they must complete a deed poll in front of a lawyer to change their “official” names.

This would include, for example, thousands of women who choose to use their husbands’ surname after marriage (as the court judgment points out — paragraph 67, if Mr Sayed-Khaiyum cares to look).

It would also include people in many other different situations.

The facts of Mr Nawaikula’s own situation are common enough. He was registered by his parents under a particular name — but from a young age he was, like many people, called something else by friends and family.

So, if Mr Sayed-Khaiyum’s argument is right, all these people who use different names are potential fraudsters.

This means that they should all – thousands of them — fill out deed poll forms, have them sworn, line up at the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registry and re-register themselves, saying “this is the real me”. Only then should they be registered to vote.

Unfortunately this is the mentality that pervades everything in Mr Sayed-Khaiyum’s government. That mentality seems to be that we are all mere units of humanity that must be precisely regulated in ways that serve the Government.

We see it in every government department.

In an age of electronic documents and identification, we have to produce our birth certificate for this, a certified copy (or something with an official ink stamp) for that.

And if we don’t comply with some silly rule, we can all be jailed for five years or fined $10,000, or lose our right to vote or to stand for elections.

It’s about us, not them No. That is not what a government is supposed to do.

The Government works for us. We do not work for the Government.

In a democratic country (which is what we say we are) we are free to do what we want. We have what are called “human rights and freedoms”.

These rights and freedoms are subject only to laws which reasonably restrict them for the greater good.

So we have freedom of speech. But we can’t use that freedom to encourage violence against minority groups. We have freedom of movement. But this can be restricted temporarily to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

And in a well-run democratic country, laws and official decisions which unreasonably restrict our basic rights to do what we want — or to be who we want to be — do not belong.

And this is so (the Court has ruled) with electoral laws.

Yes, we have the legal right to be registered under the names we are generally known by.

And no, we do not have to stand in lines and fill out forms and sign deed polls in front of lawyers just because someone in authority can’t bear the thought that our everyday names are not a perfect match with our birth certificates.

The Court of Disputed Returns (no doubt based on the legal submissions of one of those terrible lawyers who appeared before it) quoted from several court overseas court judgements. These cases emphasise that the right to vote is more important than pointless bureaucracy.

“No right,” said one American judge, “is more precious in a free country than that of having a voice in the election of those who make the laws under which, as good citizens, we must live.

“Other rights”, he continued, “even the most basic, are illusory if the right to vote is undermined.”

(That’s at paragraph 86 of the judgment, by the way).

So — no. We have a judgment which says that we do not have to submit to the petty junior clerk-style whims of our Government.

I can imagine that, while the coronavirus rages around us and tens of thousands of people continue the struggle to make ends meet, there will be feverish agitation in government corridors about a new law to neutralise the court’s judgment.

So if, in future, you find yourself standing in a line at the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registry waiting to tell some clerk that you have to change your official name because the Government said so – well, maybe you need a different government.

• RICHARD NAIDU is a Suva lawyer.

One of his law firm partners was in Mr Nawaikula’s legal team. His own voter card is the same as his birth certificate but some people still call him many other names. The views in this article are not necessarily those of The Fiji Times.