Asia | The media in Singapore

Zip it

Feisty bloggers face trouble

|SINGAPORE

IT IS not often that a criminal trial involves a prosecutor pushing for rehabilitation and appropriate counselling", and a defence lawyer urging the judge to jail his client. But that is what happened at a hearing on June 2nd for Amos Yee, a 16-year-old Singaporean blogger found guilty of circulating an obscene image and insulting Christians.

The rub, in this case, is that the prosecutor was arguing for Mr Yee to be sent to a Reformative Training Centre, a heavily structured programme for young offenders involving military-style training as well as counselling, which can last up to 30 months. Mr Yee’s lawyer was pushing for a short jail term.

As it turns out, both sides will need to wait. At a hearing on June 23rd Mr Yee—who uploaded a cartoon which depicted Singapore’s founding prime minister, the late Lee Kuan Yew, and the late British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, in a compromising position, and who mocked Christians on his YouTube channel—was remanded for another two weeks. The court is awaiting a psychiatric report after the head psychiatrist for Singapore’s prison system said that Mr Yee may be autistic.

Both Human Rights Watch and the UN Human Rights Office for South-East Asia have called for Mr Yee’s release. The UN body said Mr Yee’s punishment seemed "disproportionate and inappropriate". Since being found guilty on May 12th, Mr Yee has remained defiant. He has described Singapore’s obscenity laws as "unnecessary [and] inane" and its laws and police as "dumb". He has derided the Christian God as "fictitious, mass-murdering, sexist, racist [and] sadomasochistic" and has declared: "I have not 'learnt my lesson', nor do I see any 'lesson' that needs to be learnt."

Mr Yee may be the only blogger to court official wrath in Singapore, but he is not the only one to incur it. On May 3rd Singapore’s government shut down a contentious but popular website called The Real Singapore (TRS), along with its social-media and mobile applications (coincidentally no doubt, May 3rd happens to be World Press Freedom Day). TRS seemed to fancy itself the voice of Singapore’s working-class heartlands. It was rowdy, pointed, and its comments sections often devolved, like so many others, into an untidy jumble of name-calling and complaint. The Media Development Authority of Singapore (MDA) alleged that TRS had "fabricated articles [and] published prohibited material…objectionable on the grounds of public interest, public order and national harmony [and] sought to incite anti-foreigner sentiments in Singapore".

Another blogger, Roy Ngerng, has paid Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore’s prime minister, S$29,000 ($21,653) in legal fees and expenses, and may pay more in damages. A judge ruled that Mr Ngerng had defamed Mr Lee by accusing the prime minister of having criminally misappropriated funds that Singaporeans paid into a compulsory savings scheme.

It comes as no surprise then that, in the most recent World Press Freedom Index, Singapore ranked 153rd of 180 countries, falling three spots from last year’s rankings. Any hope that Singapore’s ruling People’s Action Party would loosen controls over the media—as part of efforts to present a softer public face after its relatively poor showing in the last election—now seem misplaced. Singapore’s government has proven itself as willing as ever to use the colonial-era Sedition Act as well as the 2014 Protection from Harassment Act to stifle dissent. As Cherian George, a former columnist for Singapore’s Straits Times who now teaches journalism in Hong Kong, puts it: the government "still acts as though it can’t win an argument on the merits, nor trust the public to reach wise conclusions through open debate".

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