I got a decent speaker for my living room and linked it to my laptop. As someone who needs to have music while working, my quality of life has vastly improved. But I hope my neighbours can’t hear my random singing…
(1)
No surprise here, but Parliament passed the Maintenance of Racial Harmony Bill. It’s a nightmare piece of legislation for democracy but, unlike with POFMA and FICA, there wasn’t much noise made about it. It feels like many people in civil society are either already over-stretched and burnt out, or have gone numb from the number of highly problematic laws passed in recent years. 🫠 🫠 🫠
Not everyone sounds down about it, though: Cherian George has a piece on how this could be a “progressive move”—the caveat being “if interpreted and applied well”. I wish I had Cherian’s optimism but I have zero faith that this law, which once again grants a huge amount of power and discretion to the Minister for Home Affairs, will be interpreted and applied well. Reading this, I’m not particularly reassured by Shanmugam’s reassurances…
(2)
Save Pannir. There have already been three executions in Singapore this year. Pannir Selvam Pranthaman, a death row prisoner I and the Transformative Justice Collective have worked in solidarity with for many years, is at great risk of imminent execution.
Pannir is a Malaysian from Ipoh. He was convicted of trafficking 51.84 g of heroin and sentenced to death in 2017. It’s not in dispute that Pannir were merely a drug courier—a role on the lowest rungs of the global illicit drug trade—but the courts couldn’t spare him from death row because the prosecution refused to issue him a Certificate of Substantive Assistance. Under the Misuse of Drugs Act, you need to be both a courier and have this certificate (or suffer from an abnormality of mind that impaired your mental responsibility for the offence) before a judge can choose life imprisonment (and maybe caning as well) instead of a mandatory death sentence. Pannir did give information to investigators, but a 2022 Court of Appeal judgment observed that, according to an affidavit from a Central Narcotics Bureau officer, “the information about Jimmy [the codename of the person to whom Pannir was supposed to deliver the drugs] which the appellant provided to the CNB ‘was not new information, was not useful to the CNB, and was not used or relied on by the CNB to arrest Zamri [the actual name of the individual] on 14 October 2014’.” The court found that, to be eligible for a Certificate of Substantive Assistance, “substantive assistance requires an enhancement to the CNB’s operational effectiveness, which means that the information provided by the accused person must at the very least have been used by the CNB”. (Emphasis mine.)
When they were discussing these amendments to the Misuse of Drugs Act in Parliament in 2012, Shanmugam stated that it wasn’t enough for the courier to cooperate in good faith because then drug syndicates could simply “prime” their mules with things to tell investigators in exchange for life-saving certificates: “So, if you say just cooperate, just do your best, all your couriers will be primed with beautiful stories, most of which will be unverifiable but on the face of it, they have cooperated, they did their best. And the death penalty will then not be imposed and you know what will happen to the deterrent value.”
But the reality is that (1) drug syndicates don’t give a shit about drug mules because they can always recruit more and (2) couriers are so low down the hierarchy that they really might not have much intel that can “enhance operational effectiveness”. In Pannir’s case, all he could do was share what he knew with the CNB. What they did or didn’t do with this information, what they already knew or didn’t know—all of this was out of his hands. Yet it is his life that’s on the line here.
I find it really appalling that we’re measuring the value of human life based on how useful the person is to law enforcement and the state’s policy goals. Given how quickly they’ve issued the last three execution notices, there might not be that much time left for Pannir. Anyone can still write to the Prime Minister and the President to ask that the Cabinet advise the President to grant him clemency. You can find the relevant contact details at the Singapore Government Directory. You can also sign the online petition calling for a moratorium on the use of the death penalty in Singapore.
(3)
Some public resources were wasted this week with a very silly investigation. On Wednesday, Teo Soh Lung and I went to Tanglin Police Division to respond to summons asking us to present ourselves for “an investigation into a potential offence of Intentionally Causing Harassment to a Public Servant under Section 6(1A) of the Protection from Harassment Act 2014”. It wasn’t made clear to us before we went what this was exactly about (I shared screenshots of my email exchange with the investigating officer in last week’s newsletter).
It turns out that the potential harassment was one of Soh Lung’s Facebook posts. On 27 December, I’d gone to Tanglin Police Division to be questioned under a Public Order Act investigation because I’d covered the MHA letter delivery action undertaken in June 2024 by a group of students and alumni of Singaporean tertiary institutions. A friend tried to accompany me to the police station but wasn’t allowed into the building because they said it was a protected place. Soh Lung wasn’t there but was upset when she heard about it and wrote a Facebook post criticising the police and urging people to call the investigating officer to check on me. She posted a photo of me, taken down the road from the station, and provided the officer’s phone number.
This, apparently, could be harassment of the police officer. Who, around that time, was questioning me as part of another unnecessary, time-wasting investigation.
Soh Lung and I were questioned by separate officers on Wednesday (and Jolovan Wham was questioned on Friday). Now we just have to wait to see what, if anything, comes out of this.
Got some more…
🏡 S Iswaran, the disgraced former transport minister who’d been in prison since October, is now serving out the rest of his sentence at home. (ngl, as an introvert I’m actually a little bit envious. I, too, would like a solid excuse to not leave my home. I’d watch a lot of Netflix and read many books.)
Around the region
Looking for writing from elsewhere? Check out these other newsletters from around Asia:
🌏 Asia Undercovered
🇰🇭 Campuccino
🇮🇩 Indonesia at a Crossroads
🇲🇾 The Malaysianist
🇻🇳 Vietnam Weekly
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