What do chewing gum, slander, and religious disharmony have in common? They’re all forbidden in the bustling city-state of Singapore, a super-efficient, super-modern, and tightly regulated economic powerhouse located off the tip of the Malay Peninsula. Granted independence from the British Empire in 1963 and from Malaysia in 1965, Singapore under former Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew has charted a national course seemingly dedicated to the proposition that not all offenses are created equal: some, like drug trafficking, deserve death, while others simply merit a painful caning.
The law in Singapore, as American journalist Mark Jacobson has observed in National Geographic, seems perpetually stuck in a precarious balancing act between “the big carrot and the big stick.” The big carrot – rapid and consistent economic growth resulting in one of the highest average standards of living in the world – has in less than fifty years transformed Singapore from a sleepy colonial outpost into a city full of towering high-rise apartments and glittering skyscrapers, home to the titans of international finance, and a frenetically Darwinistic educational and social atmosphere that produces some of the world’s finest engineers, natural scientists, and leading academics. Civil servants and government functionaries, paid astronomically high wages designed to compete with those of private-sector corporations, are largely free from corruption, while unemployment hovers around just three percent and 90 percent of families own their own home. The infamous “Five Cs of Singapore” – Cash, Car, Credit card, Condominium, and Country club – speak powerfully to the success of the so-called “Singapore Model,” a blend of economic pragmatism, an impressive national work ethic, and, above all, the overriding desire to be “number one in everything.”
But prosperity and stability, critics contend, has come at the heavy price of the “big stick”: a legal system that harshly curtails personal freedoms, squelches dissent and political opposition, and frowns upon thinking (or acting) outside the box. Freedom House in 2010 gave Singapore a score of 5 on Political Rights, 4 on Civil Liberties, and an overall rating of “Partly Free” – placing it firmly in the same category as authoritarian-leaning countries such as Venezuela and Pakistan and comparing it unfavorably with much less prosperous nations such as India, Mexico, and Turkey. Human Rights Watch has called Singapore “the textbook example of a politically repressive state,” while Amnesty International has criticized the Singaporean government for detaining suspected terrorists without trial under the infamous Internal Security Act and restricting press freedoms. The Temasek Review reports that Amara Tochi, a Nigerian national found in possession of more than 15 grams of cocaine, was hanged in January of 2007; the prosecutors, alleges the Review, were aided by a law presuming the guilt of the accused. Similarly, Malaysian national Vignes Mourthi was executed in 2003 for possessing 27 grams of drugs he claims he had mistaken for “precious incense stones used for Hindu worship.” Caning, meanwhile, remains on the books as a legitimate punishment for more than 30 crimes, a practice Amnesty International has classified as “torture” and which continues to draw the ire of major international human rights groups.
But of all the formidable weapons in the government’s legal arsenal, perhaps the most fearsome are its libel laws, inherited from the British and slanted generously in favor of the plaintiff – who often happens to be the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP), still manipulated from behind the scenes by Lee Kwan Yew in his shadowy capacity as “Minister Mentor” (MM). Employed against the very few members of Parliament not from within the ranks of the PAP, foreign and domestic writers critical of the government, and human rights activists, Singapore’s slander and libel laws have recently been leveraged against the U.S.-owned Far Eastern Economic Review for publishing an interview with an opposition politician. Also targeted was British journalist Alan Shadrake, author of Once a Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice in the Dock, which criticized Singapore’s continued and allegedly inconsistent application of the death penalty. Jean-François Julliard, Secretary-General of the France-based Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF), drafted an open letter to Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in March 2010, demanding that he “put a stop to the libel actions which you and your relatives have been bringing against Singaporean and foreign media that cover Singaporean developments in an independent manner.”
“Reporters Without Borders condemns the judicial harassment which you and your father have practiced for years in order to prevent foreign news media from taking too close an interest in how you run your country. It does serious and lasting harm to press freedom in Singapore,” declared Julliard.
Singapore’s libel laws have prompted heated discussion around the world. At Yale University, free-speech proponents have attacked Yale’s proposal to establish an extension campus in the city in conjunction with the National University of Singapore (NUS). The Yale Daily News reports that despite opposition from four humanities professors concerned with the possible suppression of academic freedom by the Singaporean government, Yale President Richard Levin plans to press ahead with the new campus.
The professors’ fears do not appear to be entirely unwarranted. As long as the New York Times can still be sued in Singaporean court for printing articles critical of the government, free speech remains limited to the miniscule Speaker’s Corner,” and leaders of the opposition Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) can still be fined for speaking in public, Singapore will remain where it is today: on the fast track to wealth and intellect, but perpetually stranded halfway on the road to democracy.
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