Hey NUS, what’s going on?

Happy weekend! Hope everyone has something fun and restful planned.

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In last week’s newsletter, I wrote about the two POFMA correction directions that the Transformative Justice Collective (which I’m an exco member of) received on the order of the Minister for Home Affairs and Law. We weren’t ready with our response then, so I went ahead and shared a bit of my own response. TJC has since published our statement, so here it is, as promised, with an excerpt below:

Perhaps the state sees the death penalty as an administrative box-ticking exercise. TJC, however, is most concerned with human lives. We do not have anywhere near the same power or platform as Minister K Shanmugam, who ordered this POFMA direction—and who, we note, has still not responded to death row prisoners’ families who, in October last year, asked to meet him—but we have borne witness to the pain, trauma and grief of too many death row prisoners and their loved ones in these instances.

In our view, the filing of post-appeal applications is not a malicious attempt to abuse the court process, but a human response to a barbaric punishment like the death penalty. It is unsurprising that death row prisoners file applications seeking reviews or stays of execution—who wouldn’t, if placed in such a horrific situation? We should never forget that these are human beings who want to live. It is not the prisoners’ determination to file applications, raise questions about their cases or challenge points of law that is untoward here. It is the state’s expectation that people should simply wait, meekly and obediently, for their turn to be killed, that is callous and inhumane. The gravity and irreversibility of imposing the death penalty on a person means that every doubt, question and issue raised should be given a thorough airing, regardless of what stage they are brought up at.

We never claimed that the government did not follow appropriate procedures to pass laws through parliament. What we called out is the government’s introduction of legislation such as the Post-Appeal Applications in Capital Cases Act (PACC) that is, in our view, an incursion into the fundamental rights of death row prisoners. What is more, on 8 May 2024, Minister Shanmugam, in response to a parliamentary question from the Leader of the Opposition, gave this chilling response: “What I was suggesting is that as we see how people file their applications, we learn. And looking at the methodology, for example, if there is a constitutional challenge—and there was last year—we may have to consider whether we need to amend the Constitution to make sure that any future constitutional challenges of such a nature will not succeed.”

We urge readers to consider the Minister’s words carefully, and whether they agree with this approach to our Constitution, the highest law of the land.

We condemn the increasing weaponisation of POFMA to target opposing opinions, which has the effect of silencing criticism. This is evident in the directions issued to TJC, and how the directions have wrongly characterised our posts via the simplistic “subject statements”.

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What is going on with the National University of Singapore? Haresh Sharma—or, should I say, CULTURAL MEDALLION WINNER Haresh Sharma—posted on Instagram that he’d been told, five days before the start of a new term at NUS, that his appointment to teach a playwriting course had not been approved. He’d been teaching at the university for the past few years, and even won a Distinguished Arts and Social Sciences Alumni Award in 2022, so this came as a nasty shock.

“I’m told that ‘the university’s decision is unrelated to issues of qualifications, experience or teaching abilities’,” Haresh wrote in his post, continuing with the very logical follow-up question, Then what?

When The Straits Times reached out to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, they were told that the module “lacked sizeable numbers to conduct the playwriting course meaningfully”. In a follow-up post on IG, Haresh said that while the university had made some reference to considering “several factors including enrolment numbers, allocation of teaching duties to full-time academic staff, and relevance and alignment to the broader curriculum”, they hadn’t directly said the sudden cancellation of his class was due to a lack of students.

Firstly, what does it mean to not have enough numbers to conduct the course “meaningfully”? How many students did NUS expect the course to have, and how many actually signed up? And if this was the reason, why couldn’t they have told Haresh this point-blank from the start?

It’s not an isolated case, either—there are others who have been suddenly dropped. Noorlinah Mohamed, actress and drama educator, received very similar treatment. It turned out that the course she’d been teaching since 2021 had been reassigned to a full-time faculty member. I suppose that’s the university’s prerogative, but the way they went about it was just really unprofessional. As Noorlinah wrote: “Did the paperwork and blocked out the dates. Worked on the module. And then dropped. No courtesy phone call. No conversation. No thank you for your service. Nothing.”

Apart from being downright rude and inconsiderate—it really screws with a freelancer’s income and schedule when you drop them suddenly—the lack of transparency and accountability has fuelled speculation about what’s going on below the surface. Is a lack of enrolment really the reason? Or is there something else? 🤨

“We… call on the Minister of Education Chan Chun Sing to investigate this worrying pattern in order to assure Singaporeans that there is no untoward political interference in the academic affairs of local universities,” Singapore Unbound wrote in a statement. “Academic freedom is the building block of great academic institutions, and any interference with that principle must be rare and legitimate, based on transparent rules.”

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I’m not sure if you’ve been following but big things are happening in Bangladesh. After weeks of protests and violence, Sheikh Hasina resigned as prime minister and fled Bangladesh on 5 August. Parliament was dissolved soon after and an interim government formed. Noble Laureate Muhammad Yunus has been sworn in to head this interim government, promising to “uphold, support and protect the constitution”. Other advisers include protest leaders, an environmental lawyer, a law professor and the human rights activist Adilur Rahman Khan—who I can personally vouch for as a fearless and amazing person, so I’m hopeful and crossing all my fingers and toes for the people of Bangladesh!

Of course, it doesn’t mean that everything’s smooth-sailing from now on. A murder investigation into Sheikh Hasina and six others from her administration has been opened by the Bangladeshi court. There have been clashes between protesters and Hasina’s supporters.

Why am I writing all this in a newsletter about Singapore? Because there are tens of thousands of people in Singapore who care very much about this. As the protests escalated—and turned violent with clashes between protesters, counter-protesters and police—some Bangladeshi migrant workers asked their employers to let them go home. Employers have also reported a slowdown in recruiting new workers from Bangladesh, because internet shutdowns and other issues have made the necessary admin more tricky to complete.

It doesn’t surprise me that these are the things construction firms are most concerned about—they’re looking out for their projects and their bottom line. But as Singaporeans, we shouldn’t be looking at what’s happening in Bangladesh solely through the lens of what’s convenient for us and our economic growth. Hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis have given so much to our country over the years. We shouldn’t see them as just workers doing our bidding; we also have a duty to be invested in their well-being and their struggles for a better home and future. What can Singaporeans do to show support and solidarity for the people of Bangladesh?

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The Straits Times published a feature about Gen Z activists and the work they do on social media. The framing, though, leaves much to be desired (emphasis mine): “By using infographics, art and dialogues to do so, these young advocates take a gentle but determined approach, posting as often as daily, to show that activism need not be shrill to be impactful.”

I don’t know all of the groups featured, but I do know people from some of them, and really, good for all these Singaporeans who are trying to do what they can with the platforms and resources they have. I just want to warn against pitting different forms of advocacy and activism against one another and playing into a “good activist/bad activist” trap. There’s a wide range of strategies and tactics that people can adopt to push the causes that they care about, and there should be space for these different approaches to exist. Social media conversations like the ones highlighted in the article are unlikely to move the needle by themselves, but they can be effective in a broader civil society ecosystem that allows activists to create different entry points for members of the public and also exert pressure on those in power. When the authorities clamp down on activism, it hurts everyone, because it narrows the field of possibilities and sends a chill throughout civil society as a whole. Our takeaway should be how different groups that employ different tactics can still work together in solidarity, rather than trying to nudge everyone into narrow ‘approved’ modes.

Thank you for reading! As always, feel free to forward this weekly wrap to anyone you like, and spread the word about this newsletter!