The High Court on September 1 ruled that Xu, chief editor of The Online Citizen news blog, “acted recklessly, with indifference to the truth and with ill-will” in publishing Shunmuganathan’s August 2019 article about tensions among Prime Minister Lee’s siblings that caused “serious harm” to the premier’s reputation, according to news reports.
According to Xu, who spoke with CPJ via email, and those reports, the journalists owe a combined 210,000 Singapore dollars (US$156,589) in damages to the prime minister.
Reports also said the court issued an injunction for the outlet not to publish or refer to the allegations made by the prime minister’s siblings.
“The punitive defamation judgment against Online Citizen bloggers Terry Xu and Rubaashini Shunmuganathan are a blight on Singapore’s democratic reputation and blow to freedom of the press in the country,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong should stop trying to sue the independent press out of existence.”
Lee’s press secretary said in a statement reported by media on September 1 that the damages awarded would be donated to charity. CPJ’s emailed requests for comment to the prime minister’s office and the High Court on the ruling’s implications for press freedom did not receive a reply.
The Online Citizen article repeated allegations made by the premier’s siblings over the contested handling of a property of their deceased father Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father, news reports said.
Infighting between Lee and his two siblings over the colonial-era property was widely reported in 2017, the reports said. Lee’s press secretary demanded that Xu remove the article and apologize, as CPJ documented at the time.
Xu said he removed the article, but then put it back up three days later with clarifications and the letter from the press secretary; he told CPJ he did not apologize.
Xu told CPJ that he would not appeal the ruling because of the nature of Singapore’s defamation laws, which he said do not recognize the defense of “qualified privilege” for online publications.
“I think the suit itself is an assault on press freedom and there is a need to call for reformation of the defamation law,” Xu told CPJ. “The prime minister chose to sue a journalist over allegations made [by] his siblings, who he chose not to sue.”
Xu said The Online Citizen would continue publishing but would abide by the court’s injunction not to publish material about the siblings’ allegations.
]]>Governments all over the world have been considering cellphone surveillance to help track and contain the spread of the coronavirus.
In Italy, Germany and Austria, Reuters reports, telecoms companies say they are turning over data containing location information to public health officials, though aggregated and anonymized to prevent individuals from being identified. Other media reports say governments in South Korea and South Africa are monitoring individual cellphone locations, and Israel this month authorized security agents tracing the coronavirus infection to access location and other data from millions of cellphone users that The New York Times reports they had been collecting, previously undisclosed, since 2002. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the program would “maintain the balance between the rights of the individual and needs of general society.”
Separately, authorities in Iran, Poland, and India are among those developing apps to monitor whether people are observing quarantine or interacting with suspected COVID-19 patients, according to international news reports.
Although public health experts say strict limitations on movement are required to contain the coronavirus, journalists are acutely aware of the risks posed to their work when governments and technology companies monitor citizens’ cellphone activities. In recent years, CPJ has tracked the journalist targets of Pegasus, a technology the Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group markets to help government agencies hack into individual phones. (The firm has told CPJ that it investigates allegations of abuse.) CPJ has separately documented how intelligence officials can abuse access to cellphone networks to track and lure reporters and their sources.
CPJ spoke to Bill Marczak, a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Berkeley, and a leading expert on cellphone surveillance technology, about the implications of coronavirus tracking measures for journalists and other targets of government surveillance. Marczak, who is also a fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and helped identify and analyze the first known use of Pegasus spyware against a civil society target, told CPJ that surveillance powers and technologies that emerge during this crisis could be very tough to roll back—and could be turned against journalists in vulnerable settings. His answers have been edited for concision and clarity.
We’re at a moment now when a lot of governments are saying they need to ramp up cellphone surveillance to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Are you concerned about how systems may be built out?
Anytime when there’s a sense of urgency around proposals to collect more data about people, those are the times when we need to pay attention, because bad things can happen. Systems can be very quickly spun up without careful review, because there’s a sense they need to get done now. Privacy and security can become an afterthought.
What we know about location data from cellphones is that even if it’s assigned an anonymous identifier, it can be reverse engineered to see where people are—at home; at work; on their commute; walking up and down their block; and of course, journalists meeting with a source.
We’ve seen lots of proposals for enhanced surveillance of cellphones during this crisis—how are you thinking about the range of what’s out there?
On one side of the spectrum, we see places like Israel, where the authorities come out and say, “Hey, so we’ve actually been collecting location metadata since 2002. We never told you about it. And now we are going to use it for public health.”
Then there’s these proposals for apps for people to download on their phones. Some do location tracking. Some claim they don’t.
In Singapore, for example, they’ve rolled out an app that claims to do proximity tracking. They use Bluetooth to ping nearby phones that have the app installed, to see which phones are near which people. And if someone is diagnosed, then the Ministry of Health can get that proximity data to map who might be exposed. These proposals sometimes don’t require the government to have a central database of everyone’s location history.
Proximity data could be problematic too, depending on where it’s stored. Even if it’s stored on the phone itself, [that phone] could be seized by authorities. You can imagine a situation where some governments can say, “This person is a journalist or activist, let’s see who they were meeting with, let’s grab their phone.”
So we do run into all of these troubling privacy possibilities with proximity tracking—though I would say there’s less potential for large scale abuse if the data is stored on a device itself.
There’s some confusion about how governments get access to these cell phone records. How does it work?
From a technical perspective, all it would require is for the government to go to cellphone companies and say, “Hey, we need to access this data, can you please share it?” They could set up some sort of arrangement where the phone companies ship that data over to a government database. Or you could see a situation where it stays with the phone company and the government requests data over time.
But the bottom line is phone companies can—and do—receive and log this sort of information.
In the U.S., we’ve seen cases where bounty hunters have accessed people’s location through brokers who are reselling this data. I suggest an appropriate mental model of this is to assume phone companies are collecting and storing this data, and can be reselling and sharing it.
We see some private companies coming in and making the case they can build a system to gather that location data, and perhaps make it useful for fighting the virus.
There was reporting that the NSO Group was possibly spinning up a “new system.” It wasn’t clear from the limited information disclosed how that monitoring would actually work. But you can imagine a situation where someone is diagnosed, you get their number, and the NSO Group starts doing location tracking on that number. This could be combined with CCTV or facial recognition technology to issue notifications when others come in contact with the infected person. But we don’t know. NSO has released no information about this.
[Editor’s note: CPJ emailed an NSO Group spokesperson in late March asking for more information about its coronavirus system but did not receive a reply before publication.]
The private surveillance industry isn’t exactly known for its respect for human rights in general, and press freedom in particular. Last year, the U.N. special rapporteur for freedom of expression even called for a global moratorium on the sale of these technologies. Are you worried about these players stepping in now?
Given the urgency with which a lot of governments are understandably approaching coronavirus, you are going to see authorities reaching for off-the-shelf solutions—they will look to buy solutions from existing surveillance firms. It’s problematic that a lot of the companies in this space have track records of working with intelligence agencies and aren’t exactly above board. They’ve potentially helped spy on journalists and activists in the past. And that’s concerning to me.
There’s another thing I am concerned about. Once a government shells out a bunch of money for a new surveillance system for location tracking, justified by the coronavirus, what happens when the virus is over? How does it get used, how does it get repurposed? Once you implement a system to track a bunch of people—it’s not likely it’s going away in the future.
In this moment where governments are reaching for more authority and technical capacity to monitor cell phones, how should journalists be thinking about these things? Should they be resisting?
I wouldn’t encourage people to subvert efforts to track them if they are infected. But when the crisis is over and life returns to normal, people should be aware that this tracking and tracing could be used beyond the length of the crisis. If you are forced to install something on your phone—and you can’t really say no—you are going to have to imagine you’ve entered a country where you have a police minder. Perhaps don’t contact a super secret source.
What role can journalists play here?
We need journalists to dig into these new schemes. If the government says we are doing location tracking, or we are doing contact tracing, we need reporters digging into what exactly they are doing. What company did you buy that tool from? Who has access to the data?
Are we at an inflection point here for cellphone surveillance?
It’s early, but this is how I am thinking about it. For governments looking for tools to hone their authoritarianism—regimes who want to get more control, or get more visibility into their citizens’ lives—the coronavirus is an issue like “fake news” or cybersecurity or terrorism that can been used to justify enhanced powers. For a sufficiently authoritarian government, the barrier to knowing where everyone is all the time is basically just cost.
In democratic contexts, it’s cost, plus getting over whatever oversight or checks are built into the system. We are going to hear more and more that we have to implement these tracking methods so we can go on about our lives.
]]>On September 1, Lee’s press secretary, Chang Li Lin, sent a letter to The Online Citizen’s chief editor, Terry Xu, threatening to file libel charges if he did not retract an article about Lee’s allegedly strained relationship with his siblings from the outlet’s website and Facebook page and publish an unconditional apology by September 4, according to news reports citing the letter.
Xu told CPJ via email that he temporarily removed the article from The Online Citizen’s website while he consulted with his lawyers over how to respond to the threat.
“Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong should drop his wrongheaded legal threat against The Online Citizen and stop harassing the press,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “Singapore will never be taken seriously as a democracy as long as Lee continues to threaten journalists with these types of punitive lawsuits.”
The letter claimed the article, titled “PM Lee’s wife, Ho Ching weirdly shares article on cutting ties with family members,” published on August 15, contained false allegations made against the prime minister by his sister, local English-language daily The Straits Times reported.
The article focused on a widely reported family disagreement over whether to preserve or demolish the former residence of national founder Lee Kuan Yew, Lee’s father, according to The Straits Times.
Under Singapore’s Defamation Act and penal code, libel is punishable by up to two years in prison, a fine, or both.
CPJ emailed Lee’s press secretary’s office for comment but did not immediately receive a reply.
In November 2018, police raided Xu’s home and interrogated him for more than eight hours over a criminal defamation complaint filed by the Info-Communications Media Development Authority over a letter critical of the prime minister published on The Online Citizen, as CPJ reported at the time. Xu’s hearings in that case will begin in a state court in November, he told CPJ.
In 2011, Lee’s government forced The Online Citizen to register as a “political association,” thereby requiring the outlet to reveal the identities of its staff members and barring it from receiving foreign funding, according to CPJ reporting.
]]>The Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act, which was passed yesterday, gives all government ministers broad and arbitrary powers to demand corrections, remove content, and block webpages if they are deemed to be disseminating falsehoods “against the public interest” or to undermine public confidence in the government, both on public websites and within chat programs such as WhatsApp, according to news reports.
Violations of the law will be punishable with maximum 10-year jail terms and fines of up to $1 million Singapore dollars (US$735,000), according to those reports. The law was passed after a two-day debate and is expected to come into force in the next few weeks, the reports said.
CPJ called on the Singapore parliament to reject the legislation when it was first introduced in April.
“This law will give Singapore’s ministers yet another tool to suppress and censor news that does not fit with the People’s Action Party-dominated government’s authoritarian narrative,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asian representative. “Singapore’s online media is already over-regulated and severely censored. The law should be dropped for the sake of press freedom.”
Law Minister K. Shanmugam told parliament that the law would not affect free speech and would aim to tackle “falsehoods, bots, trolls, and fake accounts,” the BBC reported.
According to the BBC report, while the legislation bans disseminating falsehoods within chat groups and other private social networks, it does not specify how authorities would be able to monitor such groups.
Shanmugam said censorship orders would be made mainly against technology companies that hosted the objectionable content, and that they would be able to challenge the government’s take-down requests, Singapore broadcaster Channel News Asia reported.
Singapore’s Law Ministry did not immediately reply to CPJ’s emailed request for comment on the law’s passage.
Singapore already has several laws and regulations on the books to censor news or content, particularly surrounding commentary and reporting on politics and security issues, which have led to journalists being imprisoned or forced into financial ruin, according to CPJ reporting.
]]>The legislation, known as the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Bill, allows for maximum S$1 million fines ($740,000) and 10-year prison terms for owners and administrators of websites that fail to comply with official requests to correct or remove content ruled as objectionable, according to news reports. The bill was introduced into parliament yesterday, according to those reports.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the legislation would require tech giants such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter to immediately issue corrections of false information published on their platforms and inform users when they may have been exposed to inaccuracies. It would also give government ministers the ability to order news organizations to publish corrections to false information being spread online, according to local news website Today.
The law would grant all government ministers the power to determine if information is false and if it is harming the public interest, and to issue takedown or correction notices, according to Today. Websites would have the right to request a judicial review of such orders, but only after the orders have been issued, CNBC reported.
“This legislation represents a clear and present danger to online press freedom and should be dropped immediately,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “Singapore’s leaders already have a deplorable record of censorship and tight control over the news media, and this vague legislation will inevitably lend itself to abuse. Singapore needs less, not more regulation, of its online media.”
Criminal sanctions under the legislation would be imposed if information that authorities deem false was spread by “malicious actors” who “undermine society,” according to Singapore’s Law Ministry, as reported by Reuters.
The ministry added that it would cut off a website’s “ability to profit” without shutting it down if it was determined to have published three falsehoods that were “against the public interest” over a six-month period. The ministry did not specify how a website’s funds would be restricted, but news reports note that authorities could bar digital advertisers from serving websites deemed to violate the regulations.
Singapore Law Minister K. Shanmugam was quoted by Reuters yesterday saying that the legislation would not hinder free speech because it “deals with false statements of facts. It doesn’t deal with opinions, it doesn’t deal with viewpoints.”
The Law Ministry did not immediately reply to CPJ’s emailed request for comment.
The legislation is the outgrowth of a Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods established by Singapore’s parliament in January last year, according to Today.
Singapore already has several laws and regulations on the books to censor news or content, particularly surrounding commentary and reporting on politics and security issues, according to CPJ research. Journalists have been imprisoned or forced into financial ruin.
]]>The criminal investigation stems from a reader’s letter published on The Online Citizen on September 4, 2018 that was critical of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s People’s Action Party-led government, the reports said.
The letter, published under the name Willy Sum, alleged there was “corruption at the highest echelons” of government and that Lee’s administration was “tampering with the Constitution.”
On September 18, the Info-communications Media Development Authority (IMDA), a statutory board under the Ministry of Communications and Information, ordered The Online Citizen to remove the letter within six hours, a takedown request that the site obliged, Xu wrote in a post on the news site’s Facebook page on November 21, 2018.
However, on October 4, 2018 the IMDA filed a criminal defamation report with police against The Online Citizen Xu wrote in the same Facebook post. Criminal defamation convictions carry possible two-year prison sentences and fines.
CPJ could not determine if authorities had also filed a legal complaint against Sum.
An IMDA spokesperson quoted by The Straits Times newspaper acknowledged his agency filed the criminal complaint, and said that the reader’s letter “made serious allegations that undermine the public’s confidence in the government’s integrity.”
Xu said in the Facebook post that authorities denied a request for the confiscated equipment to be returned, and told him the devices can only be returned after the investigation has been completed. The Online Citizen, established in 2006, is one of Singapore’s few independent news sites, staffed mainly by volunteers.
In a statement published November 26, 2018, The Online Citizen said that the investigation was ongoing but that it had resumed publishing after a nearly week-long “hiatus” after purchasing new hardware to run the site.
]]>The Public Order and Safety Bill, also referred to as the Special Powers Bill, was introduced in Singapore’s parliament on Tuesday, and would empower police to issue a “communications stop order” for all information pertaining to a terrorist attack pending approval from the home affairs minister, according to news reports.
The order would prevent journalists and others from taking photographs or videos at terror attack sites, and ban any communication about police operations underway at those sites, Reuters reported.
Penalties for violating the law would include a maximum two-year prison sentence, and fines of up to 20,000 Singapore dollars (US$15,200), a home ministry spokesperson told Reuters.
“Singapore’s proposed ban on photographing or videoing terror attacks would black out the news precisely when the public needs to be accurately informed,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s Southeast Asia representative. “Independent reporting is crucial to public safety in crisis situations. This draft law should be scrapped or amended to protect and uphold reporters’ rights.”
In justifying the proposed censorship measures, the Interior Ministry said that live broadcasts of attacks in other countries had at times revealed police positions and unwittingly helped the attackers, the English-language daily, the South China Morning Post said.
Singapore has not suffered a major terrorism-related attack, but authorities claimed to have foiled several plots, including an Islamic State plan to fire a rocket at the island nation from a nearby Indonesian island inn 2016, reports said.
]]>At least 81 journalists are imprisoned in Turkey, all of them facing anti-state charges, in the wake of an unprecedented crackdown that has included the shuttering of more than 100 news outlets. The 259 journalists in jail worldwide is the highest number recorded since 1990. A CPJ special report by Elana Beiser
Published December 13, 2016
More journalists are jailed around the world than at any time since the Committee to Protect Journalists began keeping detailed records in 1990, with Turkey accounting for nearly a third of the global total, CPJ found in its annual census of journalists imprisoned worldwide.
Amid an ongoing crackdown that accelerated after a failed coup attempt in July, Turkey is jailing at least 81 journalists in relation to their work, the highest number in any one country at any time, according to CPJ’s records. Turkish authorities have accused each of those 81 journalists–and dozens more whose imprisonment CPJ was unable to link directly to journalistic work–of anti-state activity.
The global total of 259 journalists jailed on December 1, 2016, compares with 199 behind bars worldwide in 2015. The previous global record was 232 journalists in jail in 2012.
After Turkey, the worst offenders in 2016 are China, which had jailed the most journalists worldwide in the previous two years; Egypt, where the total rose slightly from 2015; Eritrea, where journalists have long disappeared without any legal process into the secretive country’s detention system; and Ethiopia, where longtime repression of independent journalists has deepened in recent months.
This year marks the first time since 2008 that Iran was not among the top five worst jailers, as many of those sentenced in the 2009 post-election crackdown have served their sentences and been released.
CPJ identified eight journalists in Iranian prisons, compared with 19 a year ago. However, Tehran is still sending journalists to jail, including filmmaker Keyvan Karimi, who is serving a sentence of one year in prison and 223 lashes in relation to his documentary about political graffiti, “Writing on the City.”
In Turkey, media freedom was already under siege in early 2016, with authorities arresting, harassing, and expelling journalists and shutting down or taking over news outlets; the unprecedented rate of press freedom violations spurred CPJ to launch a special diary, “Turkey Crackdown Chronicle,” in March. The pace of arrests exploded after a chaotic attempt failed on July 15, 2016 to oust President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in a military coup. In the wake of the overthrow attempt—which the government blamed on an alleged terrorist organization led by exiled cleric Fethullah Gülen—the government granted itself emergency powers and, in a two-month period, detained, at least briefly, more than 100 journalists and closed down at least 100 news outlets.
Among those behind bars in Turkey are Mehmet Baransu, a former columnist and correspondent for the daily Taraf, who reported extensively on a previous coup plot. He is accused of, among other crimes, obtaining secret documents, insulting the president, and being a member of a terrorist organization. The most recent set of charges against him carry a maximum sentence of 75 years in prison. The journalist’s wife told CPJ that her husband was deliberately kept hungry, held in filthy conditions, verbally abused, and mistreated while being transferred from prison to various courts for hearings.
Also jailed in Turkey is Kadri Gürsel, a columnist and publishing consultant for the opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet, who was detained along with at least 11 others in a raid on the newspaper’s office in Istanbul on October 31 and accused of producing propaganda for two rival groups, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and what the government calls the Fethullah Gülen Terror Organization (FETÖ). The investigation into Cumhuriyet has been sealed by court order, so defense lawyers and the public have limited access to the state’s evidence.
Turkish authorities have also subjected Kurdish journalists to a fresh round of arrests and trials, in addition to shutting down pro-Kurdish news outlets. Zehra Doğan—a reporter for Jin News Agency (JİNHA), which is staffed entirely by women–was arrested in Southeast Turkey on the site of urban warfare between Turkish security forces and ethnic-Kurdish fighters. The state’s evidence consists of testimony from people saying they saw Doğan talking with people in the street and taking photos, according to interrogation records and an indictment that CPJ has reviewed.
CPJ examined the cases of another 67 journalists imprisoned in Turkey in late 2016 but was unable to confirm a direct link to their work. In many cases, court documents have been sealed, and in others CPJ could not identify or contact lawyers for the accused—or the lawyers were unwilling to discuss their clients with CPJ, a reflection of the tense atmosphere in Turkey. More than 125,000 people, including public workers such as police officers, teachers, and soldiers, have been dismissed or suspended and about 40,000 others have been arrested since the coup attempt, according to international news reports.
In China, which consistently ranks among the world’s worst jailers of journalists, 38 journalists were in prison on December 1. In recent weeks, Beijing deepened its crackdown on journalists who cover protests and human rights abuses. Huang Qi, publisher of the news website 64 Tianwang, was arrested in November; he has previously spent two long stints in jail for his work documenting human rights violations. After 64 Tianwang reported that police had arrested demonstrators protesting the death of a petitioner they said had been beaten by government supporters, Huang told Radio Free Asia that such reporting “could bring him trouble.”
Protests are also a no-go zone for journalists in Egypt, where CPJ identified 25 in jail. The prisoners include Mahmoud Abou Zeid, the freelance photojournalist known as Shawkan, who has been behind bars without a conviction since 2013, when he was arrested photographing the violent dispersal of a protest in support of ousted President Mohamed Morsi. He is charged with illegal assembly and murder, in a case involving more than 700 defendants. CPJ honored Shawkan with its 2016 International Press Freedom Award; in a video prepared for the awards gala, his mother showed how she cooks his meals every week, hiding fresh fruit under other food because it is forbidden to bring into Tora prison where he is held. Shawkan also has Hepatitis C.
Globally, health problems have been reported for more than 20 percent of journalists on CPJ’s prison census.
In the Americas region, CPJ identified four journalists in prison on December 1 compared with no journalists the previous year.
Other trends and details that emerged in CPJ’s research include:
The prison census accounts only for journalists in government custody and does not include those who have disappeared or are held captive by non-state groups. (These cases—such as freelance British journalist John Cantlie, held by the militant group Islamic State—are classified as “missing” or “abducted.”) CPJ estimates that at least 40 journalists are missing or kidnapped in the Middle East and North Africa.
CPJ defines journalists as people who cover the news or comment on public affairs in media, including print, photographs, radio, television, and online. In its annual prison census, CPJ includes only those journalists who it has confirmed have been imprisoned in relation to their work.
CPJ believes that journalists should not be imprisoned for doing their jobs. In the past year, CPJ advocacy led to the early release of at least 50 imprisoned journalists worldwide.
CPJ’s list is a snapshot of those incarcerated at 12:01 a.m. on December 1, 2016. It does not include the many journalists imprisoned and released throughout the year; accounts of those cases can be found at www.cpj.org. Journalists remain on CPJ’s list until the organization determines with reasonable certainty that they have been released or have died in custody.
Elana Beiser is editorial director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. She previously worked as an editor for Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal in New York, London, Brussels, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The 2016 census has been corrected to reflect the addition of Ethiopian journalist Abebe Wube, who was mistakenly left off the list when it was initially published. The text of the census has also been updated to reflect that Ethiopian journalist Solomon Kebede was released from prison in April 2016.
]]>The Administration of Justice (Protection) Bill would consolidate existing laws and judicial precedent into a statute on what may be published about court proceedings, judges, and the justice system, and, according to news reports, would allow the attorney general, rather than judges, to accuse writers of contempt, opening the door to the government’s use of the law to pursue critics,.
The draft legislation, which would also apply to material published on social media, contains broad definitions as to what constitutes contempt of court, and sets maximum penalties for infractions that would be far above what judges have ordered.
The proposed law passed its first reading in parliament on July 12. Its second reading is scheduled for August 15. A third and final reading could immediately follow if legislators do not propose amendments or object to the bill’s content, reports said.
“Singapore needs to soften, not stiffen, laws that bar critical commentary about its judicial system,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “Singaporean legislators should reject the proposed bill and prioritize instead passing laws that protect journalists and bloggers from frivolous, politically motivated lawsuits.”
Law Minister K. Shanmugam told reporters on July 11 that the draft law does not expand on the current legal definition of contempt of court, but represents a “crystallization of the law.” The minister also said that the legislation is designed to protect citizens’ right to a fair trial and ensure that court orders are obeyed. He noted that “fair” and “accurate” reporting made in “good faith” on court proceedings will not be penalized under the proposed law.
Vague language in the draft law could give the attorney general, who is appointed by the president and serves as the government’s lead prosecutor, wide discretion in determining what constitutes “fair” reporting made in “good faith.” Section 2, Part 3 of the law criminalizes publication of material that “prejudges an issue in a court proceeding that is pending and such prejudgment prejudices, interferes with or poses a real risk of prejudice to or interference with any court proceeding that is pending,” without stating how prejudice is defined.
Singaporean advocacy groups quoted in press reports say these and other broad terms from the draft legislation could encourage greater self-censorship. The Community Action Network, a local civil society group, said at a recent seminar that the law’s punitive provisions appear to specifically target “socio-political websites, activists, and those with a significant following on social media,” according to news accounts.
The draft legislation would also allow the attorney general to request a maximum penalty of three years in prison and fines of up to $100,000 Singapore dollars (US $74,500) for violations involving High Court or Court of Appeal cases. Prevailing laws for contempt of court do not define maximum penalties, and recent contempt of court sentences against writers have been much lower.
Singapore has repeatedly used contempt of court charges to silence critical commentary of its judicial system. In 2015, Singaporean blogger Alex Au Waipang was convicted of contempt of court and fined 8,000 Singapore dollars for suggesting in two blog posts that a chief justice had shown partiality in two constitutional challenges to a law criminalizing gay sex. The Court of Appeal dismissed his challenge to the ruling, with a three judge panel ruling later that year that his article posed a “real risk” of undermining public confidence in the judiciary and that the administered fine was “wholly appropriate,” reports said.
British author and former journalist Alan Shadrake was sentenced in 2010 to six weeks in prison, with another two weeks added because he could not pay a fine of 20,000 Singapore dollars, for “scandalizing” Singapore’s court system in his book Once a Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice in the Dock, which criticized the country’s use of capital punishment.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The photo caption has been corrected to reflect that Lee Kuan Yew, who died in 2015, was the founder of modern Singapore. The text has been modified in the final paragraph to correct the jail sentence given to Alan Shadrake.
]]>Ai Takagi, co-editor of The Real Singapore news site, pled guilty to four counts of sedition on March 8 for four separate articles published on her website, according to news reports. On Wednesday District Judge Salina Ishak found that the articles “were intended from the outset to provoke unwarranted hatred against foreigners in Singapore,” and sentenced her to 10 months in prison, reports said. The news website was the first to have its license revoked by a state media regulatory board formed under regulations introduced for online media in 2013, according to CPJ research.
“The conviction of journalist Ai Takagi risks further suffocating Singapore’s once-vibrant online media space,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “Rather than imprisoning and threatening journalists with sedition charges, Singaporean authorities should promote an open Internet.”
Police arrested Takagi, a law student who helped edit the site from Australia, last year while she was vacationing in Singapore, according to press accounts. News reports said she is now eight weeks pregnant and may have to start serving her sentence before giving birth.
The court on Wednesday released Takagi on bail and allowed her a month to settle her personal affairs before reporting to prison, news reports said. She read an apology in court saying she was not “fully aware” of the sensitivity of racial and religious issues in Singapore while editing the site, and admitted that certain stories were fabricated, reports said. There was no indication she intended to appeal the decision, according to reports.
Her husband, Yang Kaiheng, a Singaporean national and the site’s co-editor, will stand trial next week on the same sedition charges, which carry maximum penalties of three years in prison, according to reports. Yang has maintained his innocence, the reports said.
One of the articles in question wrongfully identified a Filipino family as having stoked violence during a Hindu religious ceremony, according to news reports. Another report alleged that a Chinese woman had encouraged her grandson to urinate in a bottle while traveling on Singaporean public transport, reports said. The website published mainly crowd-sourced articles that appeared on the site without much editorial control, the reports said.
In June 2013, Singapore introduced regulation of all websites that report on local news and receive more than 50,000 unique visitors with IP addresses in Singapore for two consecutive months, according to news reports. Such websites must apply for a license, pay a bond of 50,000 Singapore dollars (about US$37,500) bond, and remove any “prohibited content,” including news deemed detrimental to public interests, within 24 hours of being contacted by the Media Development Authority.
Singaporean authorities have used tight controls and strict laws to censor the local news media and threaten foreign media. On March 14, a court ordered independent blogger Roy Ngerng to pay Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong $109,000 in libel damages for a post on his personal blog that Lee’s lawyers claimed alleged the prime minister had misappropriated state pension funds, according to reports. The order, which followed a November 2014 conviction, will require Ngerng to make monthly payments to the premier over a 17-year period, the reports said. Lee’s lawyer said Ngerng’s allegations were “false and baseless,” according to news reports.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The fourth paragraph has been corrected to indicate that Takagi is eight weeks pregnant.
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