Never Waste A Crisis: How Singapore’s PAP Government uses “Rule of Law” to Restrict Freedom of Expression

Thum Ping Tjin*
IPI member, founder of New Naratif

Singapore’s Constitution guarantees every citizen the right to freedom of speech and expression but also permits Parliament to restrict this freedom on grounds of security, public order, morality, and other conditions. On this basis—chiefly by interpreting security and public order in the broadest possible manner, and framing their response in terms of dealing with a genuine problem—Singapore’s governing People’s Action Party (PAP) has, since 1959, successively passed laws which have effectively curtailed freedom of speech. How effectively? Consider Singapore’s World Press Freedom ranking of 158. This puts it four places below Turkey, and also below countries like Mexico, Russia, and the Congo: places where journalists are assaulted, abducted, or disappeared. There is little physical danger to journalists in Singapore. The main threats are legal and financial. Yet Singapore’s freedom of expression is so heavily restricted that, when one totals all the challenges to journalists, Singapore still ends up below places where journalists have been murdered in the streets in broad daylight.

From 1962, the PAP has cracked down on a wide array of legitimate political activity, through harassment (e.g. spying on/ raiding opposition gatherings), distraction (e.g. suing/charging opposition activists), suppression (e.g. banning opposition rallies), and outright coercion (e.g. detaining opposition leaders indefinitely without trial, banning trade unions and other organisations).

Singapore is a de facto single party state. Elections are neither free nor fair. Between 1968 and 1981 the PAP controlled every single seat in Parliament. The opposition recently made significant gains, winning 10 seats (out of 93), but Singapore uses the Westminster system, where a party with just half of the seats has total control; a party with at least two thirds of the seats can change the Constitution at will. The PAP has ruthlessly used this power to pass laws or change the constitution, allowing it to justify its actions under ‘Rule of Law’. Laws targeting freedom of expression ensure the PAP’s monopoly of the transmission of information in all public (and increasingly, private) spaces.

One example is the Vandalism Act (1966) which was framed as a law against damage of property, but no damage to property needs to occur for the law to be broken, only public transmission of information. This enables the government to monopolise public information. Offenders face up to three years in jail and caning. In 2017, an activist was convicted of breaking this law when he temporarily stuck two pieces of paper with political slogans on a subway train wall, even though he caused no damage.

Another example is the Newspapers and Printing Presses Act (1974). No newspaper may be published in Singapore without a permit from the Minister, who also has the power to appoint management shareholders and control transfer of management shares. This led to the consolidation of all print and broadcast media in Singapore into two companies, both effectively government-controlled. Leading members of the mainstream media have detailed how the PAP government intervenes in their work and one even frankly admitted that they “publish propaganda”.

The Public Order Act (2009) defines “political activity” so broadly (e.g. a “public assembly” is one or more person)  it effectively makes all political activity illegal without a permit from the police (which are very difficult to obtain). Individuals who wore T-shirts with anti-death penalty slogans, or took photos of themselves with a political slogan to post on social media, have been investigated by the police under this Act.

In the internet era, websites have been enmeshed in a web of regulations which target both the information published and their funding. Again, many of these laws are passed for ostensibly protective reasons: the Protection Against Online Harassment Act (2014) was to deal with cyberbullying, but was promptly used by the Ministry of Defence to accuse a tiny newsblog of harassing it by publishing accurate news.

Most recently, the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (2019), ostensibly to deal with “fake news”, allows a Minister to simply declare a given statement is false and issue a “Correction Direction” that forces the relevant media to carry officially-mandated corrections, with non-compliance carrying jail terms of up to three years and fines as high as S$500,000 (US$365,000). The law has been heavily used against critics and opponents of the PAP regime, including 17 times in just five days during the recent General Election.

In sum, the PAP government has responded to crises (both real and imagined) by passing laws which have expanded the scope of Ministers and senior officials to act arbitrarily to control the transmission of information and to control the public narrative.

* Thum Ping Tjin (“PJ”) is a historian of Malaya and a campaigner for democracy, human rights, and freedom of expression in Southeast Asia. He is founder and Managing Director of New Naratif and Visiting Fellow at Hertford College, University of Oxford. A Rhodes Scholar, Commonwealth Scholar, Olympic athlete, and the only Singaporean to swim the English Channel, his historical work centres on the legacy of colonialism in Southeast Asia. He is also creator of “The History of Singapore” podcast, available on iTunes. He has been repeatedly attacked, smeared, and harassed by the PAP government of Singapore, but remains unbroken and unbowed.