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08-05-2014, 05:10 PM
An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:
Source: 鐵錘藍天海 (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=291593374334413&set=a.244195259074225.1073741827.244188889074862&type=1&theater)
https://scontent-a-sin.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn2/t1.0-9/q71/s720x720/1544361_291593374334413_4873584298039644753_n.jpg
The mid 1960s was a period in which Lee Kuan Yew and the People’s Action Party’s hold on power was tenuous. After ramming through merger with Malaysia, the project fell apart within two years, proving Lee disastrously wrong in his political ideas. The PAP felt itself particularly vulnerable in 1966 when it offered Singapore as an R&R (rest and recreation) base for American soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War. It made Singapore into an American lackey, and reinforced the Barisan Sosialis’ anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist credentials when the party opposed American involvement in that war.
But the Barisan Sosialis was already half-crippled from having its leaders detained without trial under the Internal Security Act (Operation Cold Store 1963). Nonetheless, its remaining activists tried their best to communicate with the public and the chief means of doing so was through putting up posters at many locations. Slogans such as “Yankees go home” were painted too.
The existing Minor Offences Act already made vandalism a crime, punishable with a $50 fine and/or a week in jail. But this was not considered sufficient when the objective became one of political extermination. So a new law was introduced raising the fine to $2,000 with a maximum of three years in jail. It was also made into a non-bailable offence — which is quite incredible for such a minor, non-violent offence — presumably to stop accused persons from putting up more posters while out on bail. More crucially, it made caning (minimum three strokes, maximum eight) mandatory.
As Rajah notes, this breached two fundamental principles of law: the penalty is now disproportionate to the gravity of the offence; and sanguinary punishment (caning) is being used for a property offence.
I myself can see in it limned a third violation of principle — the way discretion was taken away from the courts when caning was made mandatory. This seems to me to be an early example of how courts could not be trusted to act in ways the PAP wanted, and which would progress to the ousting of judicial review altogether in the book’s later examples.
She writes:
The ‘rule of law’ principle that punishment should be proportionate, and not cruel and degrading, was violated by the Vandalism Act’s history of being, in part, enacted to ‘humiliate’ those who dare paint slogans challenging the government.
– Jothie Rajah, Authoritarian Rule of Law, Cambridge University Press 2012, page 98.
Through this case study of the Vandalism Act, Rajah introduces her readers to the key thrust of her research and book: how ‘law’ itself has been used to eviscerate the rule of law in Singapore.
Rule of law deformed into rule by law
The rule of law is a concept in which the state itself must be subordinate to law; it cannot act arbitrarily and coercively against the rights of citizens. To have any meaning,
[a] liberal concept of citizenship and the capacity for civil society to counter the state are major constituents of political liberalism, a mode of ‘politics’ which, in turn, informs the ‘rule of law’.
– ibid, page 161.
Her book thus aims to
[trace] the Singapore state’s reconfiguration of the profoundly liberal concept of ‘rule of law’ into an illiberal ‘rule by law’ through the state’s manipulation of legislation and public discourse.
– ibid, page 267.
and focusses on
state measures to silence actors who seek the scrutiny and containment of state power.
– ibid, page 46.
The example of the Vandalism Act also illustrates how the PAP government tries to maintain the fiction that there is rule of law in Singapore. The Act was passed by going through the formal motions of Westminster parliamentary democracy, but parliament at that time consisted only of PAP members.
Several Barisan Sosialis MPs were detained under the Internal Security Act and the rest were boycotting parliament in protest. Furthermore, the alarmist, ideological assertions of the PAP as to the seriousness of vandalism, e.g. how such behaviour would frighten away investors and destroy any chance of prosperity, not only dominated the discursive space but were swallowed wholesale by the courts.
In the case of fifteen-year-old (yes! fifteen) Ang Chin Sang, sentenced to three months’ imprisonment and three strokes of the cane.
Source: http://yawningbread.wordpress.com/20...-jothie-rajah/ (http://yawningbread.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/book-authoritarian-rule-of-law-by-jothie-rajah/)
Click here to view the whole thread at www.sammyboy.com (http://www.singsupplies.com/showthread.php?181181-Do-you-know-why-we-have-the-vandalism-law&goto=newpost).
Source: 鐵錘藍天海 (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=291593374334413&set=a.244195259074225.1073741827.244188889074862&type=1&theater)
https://scontent-a-sin.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn2/t1.0-9/q71/s720x720/1544361_291593374334413_4873584298039644753_n.jpg
The mid 1960s was a period in which Lee Kuan Yew and the People’s Action Party’s hold on power was tenuous. After ramming through merger with Malaysia, the project fell apart within two years, proving Lee disastrously wrong in his political ideas. The PAP felt itself particularly vulnerable in 1966 when it offered Singapore as an R&R (rest and recreation) base for American soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War. It made Singapore into an American lackey, and reinforced the Barisan Sosialis’ anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist credentials when the party opposed American involvement in that war.
But the Barisan Sosialis was already half-crippled from having its leaders detained without trial under the Internal Security Act (Operation Cold Store 1963). Nonetheless, its remaining activists tried their best to communicate with the public and the chief means of doing so was through putting up posters at many locations. Slogans such as “Yankees go home” were painted too.
The existing Minor Offences Act already made vandalism a crime, punishable with a $50 fine and/or a week in jail. But this was not considered sufficient when the objective became one of political extermination. So a new law was introduced raising the fine to $2,000 with a maximum of three years in jail. It was also made into a non-bailable offence — which is quite incredible for such a minor, non-violent offence — presumably to stop accused persons from putting up more posters while out on bail. More crucially, it made caning (minimum three strokes, maximum eight) mandatory.
As Rajah notes, this breached two fundamental principles of law: the penalty is now disproportionate to the gravity of the offence; and sanguinary punishment (caning) is being used for a property offence.
I myself can see in it limned a third violation of principle — the way discretion was taken away from the courts when caning was made mandatory. This seems to me to be an early example of how courts could not be trusted to act in ways the PAP wanted, and which would progress to the ousting of judicial review altogether in the book’s later examples.
She writes:
The ‘rule of law’ principle that punishment should be proportionate, and not cruel and degrading, was violated by the Vandalism Act’s history of being, in part, enacted to ‘humiliate’ those who dare paint slogans challenging the government.
– Jothie Rajah, Authoritarian Rule of Law, Cambridge University Press 2012, page 98.
Through this case study of the Vandalism Act, Rajah introduces her readers to the key thrust of her research and book: how ‘law’ itself has been used to eviscerate the rule of law in Singapore.
Rule of law deformed into rule by law
The rule of law is a concept in which the state itself must be subordinate to law; it cannot act arbitrarily and coercively against the rights of citizens. To have any meaning,
[a] liberal concept of citizenship and the capacity for civil society to counter the state are major constituents of political liberalism, a mode of ‘politics’ which, in turn, informs the ‘rule of law’.
– ibid, page 161.
Her book thus aims to
[trace] the Singapore state’s reconfiguration of the profoundly liberal concept of ‘rule of law’ into an illiberal ‘rule by law’ through the state’s manipulation of legislation and public discourse.
– ibid, page 267.
and focusses on
state measures to silence actors who seek the scrutiny and containment of state power.
– ibid, page 46.
The example of the Vandalism Act also illustrates how the PAP government tries to maintain the fiction that there is rule of law in Singapore. The Act was passed by going through the formal motions of Westminster parliamentary democracy, but parliament at that time consisted only of PAP members.
Several Barisan Sosialis MPs were detained under the Internal Security Act and the rest were boycotting parliament in protest. Furthermore, the alarmist, ideological assertions of the PAP as to the seriousness of vandalism, e.g. how such behaviour would frighten away investors and destroy any chance of prosperity, not only dominated the discursive space but were swallowed wholesale by the courts.
In the case of fifteen-year-old (yes! fifteen) Ang Chin Sang, sentenced to three months’ imprisonment and three strokes of the cane.
Source: http://yawningbread.wordpress.com/20...-jothie-rajah/ (http://yawningbread.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/book-authoritarian-rule-of-law-by-jothie-rajah/)
Click here to view the whole thread at www.sammyboy.com (http://www.singsupplies.com/showthread.php?181181-Do-you-know-why-we-have-the-vandalism-law&goto=newpost).