Ironically, it was the PAP governments obsession with destroying - rather than merely defeating - its opponents which led it to overplay its hand. Not content with having him convicted, bankrupted, and expelled from parliament, its obsession with humiliating him led it in 1987 to take away his right to practise law. But it failed to notice an obscure clause in the Legal Practitioners Act, which permitted an appeal by a debarred solicitor to the privy council in London. It was there that the whole trumped-up series of charges against Ben unravelled. The English law lords reviewed the case and voiced a devastating condemnation of the Singapore judges who had handled it, expressing deep disquiet that by a series of misjudgments Ben and his co-accused had suffered a grievous injustice. The Singapore government responded by abolishing all appeals to the privy council, and still adamantly refuses to sign any human rights treaty which would permit any more decisions of its courts to be appealed to an international tribunal. But the privy council judgment in Jeyaretnams case still resounds, as a warning to other judges tempted to fail in their task of standing up for the subject against the state. For the last 40 years, Ben pointed out Singapores democratic deficit. His speeches were not properly reported in the Straits Times, and any foreign newspaper that interviewed him risked having its circulation cut to 400 copies and sold only in tourist hotels. His voice was loudest in 1988 when Lee and son (the latter as home affairs minister) detained for two years without trial 20 young Catholic youth workers, lawyers and playwrights accused of participation in a Marxist plot. They were tortured by use of what Lee junior (now Singapores prime minister) described as psychological pressure to extract confessions - dressed in cotton pyjamas, they were blasted for hours with freezing cold air conditioners. With organisations such as Amnesty banned from Singapore, Bens voice was important in exposing the cruelty of their treatment. Ben felt that many western criticisms of Singapore were misplaced. They focused on laws against jay-walking, urinating in public and dropping chewing gum wrappers. The real concern was that the PAP had turned the city state into an ersatz democracy by suppressing well-intentioned dissent, and even the reporting of such dissent, in order to maintain its monopoly of power. His views were set out in a book in 2003 by Chris Lydgate that serves as his biography: Lees Law - How Singapore Crushes Dissent., Geoffrey Robertson, The Guardian theguardian/world/2008/oct/07/2
Posted on: Thu, 28 Nov 2013 06:47:53 +0000
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