Workers' Party warns against amending Protection from Harassment Act to protect govt

The Workers’ Party (WP) has expressed its concern over the Law Ministry’s response to a court ruling that the WP says “suggests that the government is looking into taking further action” with regard to Singapore’s Protection from Harassment Act (PHA).

In a press release issued on Sunday (22 January), the WP said it would “vigorously oppose” attempts to amend the law so as to “more clearly define” how the PHA “protects the government from harassment”.

This was said in reference to the Court of Appeal’s recent ruling against the Ministry of Defence (Mindef), in which the ministry was again found to not qualify as a “person” under Section 15 the PHA and, thus, could not compel socio-political website The Online Citizen remove statements made by inventor Ting Choon Meng over a patent rights dispute.

A Straits Times report on 17 January cited a Law Ministry spokesman as saying that the government would study the aforementioned ruling “and consider what further steps it should take to correct the deliberate spreading of falsehoods”.

Causes for concern

The WP also cited the government’s response to a December 1988 Court of Appeal ruling as a “precedent in our legal history” that justifies the party’s current concerns.

That year, the Court of Appeal passed a landmark judgment in the case of “Cheng Suan Tze v Minister for Home Affairs, in which it ruled that the legality of detention orders under the Internal Security Act (ISA) had to be subject to judicial review. According to the WP release, the government disagreed with the ruling and “by end-January 1989, had passed retrospective legislation to abolish judicial reviews and appeals to the Privy Council for ISA cases”.

Referring to the 2014 Parliament debate on the PHA, the WP said the focus then was to protect individuals from harassment. The prospect of the law being used to protect the government and the rationale for why this was necessary were not raised as being the aims of the law, the release said.

“For the (PHA) to be used to protect the government from ‘harassment’ risks weakening Singapore’s climate of free speech and robust debate,” said the WP.

“It risks turning the PHA into the latest in the many tools that the government can use against Singaporeans who publicly express different views from the government on its policies and actions.”