Greetings from Jakarta this National Day weekend. I’m here to represent Mekong Review at the Road to Jakarta Content Week. The very pathetic amount of Indonesian that I know is not helping me much, but I can pronounce the names of dishes and that's really the most important part. My GOD the food is good.
(1)
Why can’t death row prisoners just shut up and die quietly? The more the state addresses the death penalty, the more I get this vibe. It’s like they’re infuriated by death row prisoners trying whatever they can to live, after the state has already marked them for death.
Last week, the Transformative Justice Collective published a post about an execution scheduled for 2 August (which later took place, followed by another execution on Wednesday). We were POFMA-ed by the Minister for Home Affairs and Law, K Shanmugam, on Thursday. It made the news before any of us knew of it, because we’d missed the email they sent at about 2pm. I only realised that we’d been POFMA-ed when I saw the follow-up email sent at 8:02pm—two minutes after the deadline they’d given us earlier to comply with the order. Sorry, we weren’t checking emails because we were busy. But perhaps not as busy as whoever sent the snippy follow-up email at 9:58pm, pointing out that we hadn’t pinned the Facebook post carrying the correction notice to the top of our page, as demanded by the order. Thoughts and prayers for whoever had to work overtime because of this. I hope you didn’t have to refresh TJC’s social media accounts too many times to check on us.
TJC will be responding to the POFMA order in due course. What follows here is my own reaction. The POFMA direction takes issue with four “subject statements”—they flagged parts of almost every paragraph—but I’ll just look at two of them so this section doesn’t get too long. (There are other things to write about this week!) I’ll follow-up with TJC’s response in the next newsletter.
I’d like to invite everyone to read these passages for yourselves. This is what we said at the beginning of our post (the bit in square brackets was not quoted by the authorities in the correction direction):
On Thursday, 1 August 2024, the Transformative Justice Collective learnt that a Singaporean death row prisoner was issued an execution notice on Monday, 29 July 2024, informing him and his family that his execution has been scheduled for Friday, 2 August 2024.
[Not only is this notice period shorter than the seven days usually granted, the notice was also issued before the written judgment was delivered in a case the prisoner brought before the court to challenge his conviction. In other words,] his execution was scheduled even before the court judgment was out. Why such haste? To make the situation even more egregious, this prisoner is also part of a separate ongoing joint application, with a hearing scheduled for September 2024. Why is the state denying him the opportunity to see this application through?
The government claims TJC falsely stated that the execution had been scheduled without regard for due legal process. But this is what they wrote in their own statement (emphasis mine):
On 29 July 2024, the PACP was given notice that his execution was to take place on 2 August 2024. As at 29 July 2024, the PACP had two pending legal applications: (i) his third review application—this was materially similar to the first two that had already been dismissed by the CA previously; and (ii) a civil appeal (jointly with other PACPs), relating to the High Court’s decision to strike out an application for a declaration that the policy of not assigning Legal Assistance Scheme for Capital Offences (LASCO) counsel for post-appeal applications was unconstitutional.
The pending review application was statutorily prohibited under s 394K(5) of the Criminal Procedure Code 2010. On 30 July 2024, the CA dismissed the application, and found it to be “totally without merit” and that “its commencement and continuation was an abuse of the process of the Court”. Accordingly, the Court found that the application was an abuse of process and dismissed it before the sentence was carried out.
The outcome of the civil appeal would have had no bearing on his conviction and sentence. The CA confirmed this on 2 August 2024 before the PACP’s sentence was carried out.
Thus the prisoner was scheduled for the sentence to be carried out with due legal process.
So TJC was right: at the time that the execution notice was issued, the prisoner had two legal applications that were still pending, and the notice had been issued before the written judgment was delivered for the review application. The government’s statement includes that the prisoner had other applications and stays of execution before this, but I don’t think that’s the point here. The point is that they scheduled his execution and issued him an execution notice while he still had legal cases pending. That, in my view, is highly problematic and troubling. The government might disagree and have a different interpretation of what constitutes “due legal process”, but they’ve confirmed themselves that the prisoner’s execution had been scheduled even before the written judgment was out. Which is what TJC said.
The government also took issue with this part of our post (again, the bit in square brackets was left out):
As abolitionist activists who have worked closely with multiple families of death row prisoners, we have borne witness to plenty of abuse and contempt. [We see contempt for human dignity, relationships, and the rights of prisoners. We see how human life is treated frivolously while desperate prisoners and families are accused of wasting court resources with “frivolous” cases. We’ve seen a prisoner kept in court until almost 1am when his execution was scheduled for 6am the same day—he missed out on precious time with his family and his last meal.] We have seen applications, which would usually have gone through months-long processes, expedited to mere days, putting prisoners with no legal counsel, no resources and no legal training in the most intimidating and unfair position of rushing to prepare and argue their own cases against well-resourced, highly educated state prosecutors.
They say it’s false to claim that “Prisoners awaiting capital punishment are denied legal counsel in court proceedings, and have to rush to prepare and argue their own cases which are purposely scheduled to be heard at short notice.”
You can read this write-up I wrote about a joint application in 2022 and see if it matches what we described (which is not the same as what they say we said).
Kirsten Han
(2)
There is no gerrymandering in Singapore, Chan Chun Sing declares. The minister-in-charge of the public service rejected proposals from opposition parties to make changes to how electoral boundaries are drawn. “The government will oppose the motion given its false premises and suggestions that the electoral boundary review process and our public officers who serve on it, have not been transparent or fair,” he said.
Does anyone believe the man? I really don’t know. Gerrymandering has been talked about for a looooong time in Singapore. (I wrote about this in 2015.) I mean, our electoral boundaries make no damn sense. It makes people suspicious, and I don’t think enough has been done to reassure anyone that there’s no funny business going on.
If the government wants to address concerns about gerrymandering, they could have accepted the suggestion, made by Hazel Poa of the Progress Singapore Party, to make a High Court judge chair of the committee instead of the prime minister’s secretary. After all, it’s not only important for the process to be fair, it also needs to be seen to be fair.
(3)
To sell or not to sell? Allianz would like to buy a majority stake in Income Insurance, and lots of people are unhappy about it. NTUC Income’s former CEO, Tan Suee Chieh, is among those who insist that the deal is a bad idea; he’s also backed by Ambassador-at-Large Tommy Koh.
A bunch of MPs asked questions about this deal in Parliament. Chee Hong Tat, the minister for transport, second minister for finance and board member of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (my goodness, what a busy boy), tried to assuage some concerns:
Should the proposed deal be approved, there will be no change to the terms and conditions of existing insurance contracts. MAS expects Income to fulfil its obligations to all policyholders under the terms of its existing insurance contracts. I note that Allianz has also publicly stated its intent for Income to continue to honour the terms of the existing policies underwritten by Income and ensure a seamless transition with no impact to existing policyholders. MAS will hold Income and Allianz to account to these commitments.
Behind the debate over whether this specific deal should go through is the question of whether organisations and cooperatives set up with social missions (such as to support workers) are being undermined by capitalism and privatisation. What is NTUC’s core purpose, and how far might it have strayed?
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