HEROHERSTORYTESTIMONIESHAVE YOUR SAYARCHIVES
On 29th June 2026, CIJ celebrates its 25th Anniversary! For this momentous occasion, we want to talk about a very important topic close to our work in advocating freedom of expression now for over two decades: TRANSPARENCY. We want to show how we have gone about bringing it to the people in Malaysia and what brought us to doing it. Spend some time and have a look at our herstory and everyone else's account of their story with working together to bring transparency to Malaysia!
In 1998, five journalists, writers and activists responded to Malaysia's political crisis by building something the public needed — a space for independent, critical information. What began as a website called sakai.com ("witness") grew into the Centre for Independent Journalism. For 25 years since, CIJ has been at the forefront of media freedom, right to information, and freedom of expression in Malaysia.
saksi.com — Malaysia's first independent online news site, born out of the Reformasi crisis.
September — Radio training in Jakarta with Indonesia's Radio 68H, planting the seed for Malaysia's first online radio.
29 June — CIJ officially registered. RadiQradio launches as Malaysia's first online Malay-language community radio.
RadiQradio ends. CIJ pivots to media advocacy — including defending Malaysiakini against sedition raids and early calls for a Malaysian Media Council.
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I've had the privilege of working closely with the CIJ team in our shared efforts to uphold the right to information in Malaysia. I treasure the time we've spent together on this journey: drafting of the CSO Model RTI Bill, having countless strategy planning meetings and calls, travelling domestically and internationally. It remains to be seen whether Parliament will actually pass an FOI Act this year, but at the very least we can say that we pushed the agenda forward. I trust that CIJ will continue to do great work, and am excited to see what's next!
But we want you to weigh in on transparency in Malaysia! With AI popping up all over the place, we want to use it to get critical, funny or interesting with: creating headlines, fake news articles, funny posters, links or even graphics of the problems we still have with transparency in Malaysia. Check out some of our examples below!
And if you want to learn more, check out our annual report below.
