Singapore up to Old Tricks in Charge Against Opposition Leader

Critics fear the PAP is using the courts again to foil opposition

The belated charge last week against Workers Party leader Pritam Singh of lying to a parliamentary committee in a 2021 affair is the latest example of Singapore’s ruling People’s Action Party flexing its legal muscle against opposition political leaders, critics say.

The two charges of lying against Singh are hardly likely to be considered a surprise by those familiar with Singapore’s history since its modern founding in 1965. PAP leaders and the Lee family are renowned for their hair-trigger proclivity to bring lawsuits against the international press, or particularly opposition members to bankrupt them or otherwise immobilize their electoral ambitions, with prominent targets including Singh’s Worker’s Party predecessor Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam, who was repeatedly bankrupted and disqualified, and Singapore Democratic Party leader Chee Soon Juan, who was bankrupted in 2011. In February, while he wasn’t bankrupted or charged, Leong Mun Wai stepped down as secretary-general of the Progress Singapore Party (PSP) to "take responsibility" for a recent order brought against him under the government’s “fake news” law.

Singapore has no parliamentary privilege laws which protect MPs elsewhere, particularly in the UK, on which Singapore originally patterned its Westminster rules of government. Opposition figures can thus be sued for defamation for any slagging off of government or elected officials. Litigation usually follows until bankruptcy. Any MP previously could be disqualified after having been fined at least S$2,000 (US$1480) or jailed for at least 12 months. However, recent amendments to the Parliament (Privileges, Immunities and Powers) Act have raised the minimum fine sums required to trigger disqualification from standing in political office,

The timing of charges regarding a two-year-old controversy of which he wasn’t the main character would thus not be lost on Singh, who is accused of having lied to a parliamentary committee in 2021 over investigations into another falsehood controversy, this one involving a then-Workers Party Member of Parliament. The Workers’ Party made historic gains in the 2020 polls, winning a record ten seats and taking over two group representation constituencies, the most impressive showing by the opposition since independence.

The current affair blew up when Raeesah Khan, then a Worker Party rising star, claimed during a parliamentary debate on August 3, 2021 that she had accompanied a 25-year-old rape victim to a police station to make a report three years prior, only to have the victim dismissed with derogatory comments about her dressing and drinking prior to her alleged rape. After Law and Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam charged that police had no record of such an incident, and on further confrontation by Leader of the House Indranee Rajah, Khan finally acknowledged that she hadn’t actually accompanied the victim to make her police report, instead having lifted the story without the victim’s permission from a Facebook womens’ support group.

The PAP promptly convened a parliamentary committee to investigate and convict Khan for lying under parliamentary privilege. While Khan paid the price by acknowledging the falsehood on November 1, then resigning as a Workers Party MP and retiring from public life on November 30, that wasn‘t enough for the PAP leadership, which appeared determined to keep the issue before the public as long as possible.

The government convened a parliamentary committee on December 2 and 3 of that year, which laid the roots for Pritam Singh’s current legal troubles. Khan had claimed that Workers’ Party leadership including Pritam Singh had told her not to clarify the lie “if she and the WP could get away with it,” and that she “take the information to the grave.” This was in 15, leadership had known of Khan’s lie a week after her parliamentary appearance in August 2021, he hadn’t told her to carry on with the lie but instead chose out of sensitivity to the topic of rape to let her clarify her statement to parliament in her own time and discuss matters with her family.

Singh would affirm that statement when officially called to testify to the parliamentary committee on several occasions in December. When the committee released its report on February 15, 2022, Singh decried the committee’s political choice in choosing to focus more on Khan’s “uncorroborated testimony” regarding his and the Workers Party leadership’s instruction to “take her lie to her grave” instead of investigating why Khan had lied to Parliament in the first place. When the PAP-dominated parliament ultimately voted to accept the report’s findings, it also referred Singh and another senior WP leader, Faisal Manap, to the public prosecutor and police for further investigations regarding their conduct at the committee hearings.

It would be more than two years before Singh would be officially charged with lying to the committee. Faisal Manap would be let off with a warning. Legal experts in Singapore speculate that Singh stands a chance of avoiding the fate of JB Jeyaretnam, his political predecessor, who would be driven from politics by Lee Kuan Yew, the current prime minister’s father. The fact that state prosecutors have also indicated that they do not wish to send Singh to jail but intend to ask the court to impose a fine if successfully convicted further lessens the direct potential threat to his political career, although their lawsuit certainly appears aimed at causing reputational damage towards him and the Workers’ Party in the eyes of moderate swing voters. The next election doesn’t have to be called before November 2025 but political analysts say it could be called sooner if the economy and the political stars align in the PAP’s favor.

If the timing of the suit wasn’t a political decapitation strike against the opposition leader, other circumstances highlight the partisan nature of the PAP government’s “lawfare.” The committee that investigated Khan’s lying in Parliament as well as accusing Singh of abetting her lies was led by then-House Speaker Tan Chuan Jin, who in July 2023 was forced to resign after dual scandals of being caught on a hot-mic swearing in parliament at another Workers’ Party MP and the disclosure of his three-year long extramarital affair with another PAP MP by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who admitted covering for Tan’s affair after first being made aware of it in 2020.

Pritam Singh’s charging on 19 March 2024 was also coincidentally the date which former Transport Minister S. Iswaran was due to return from his personal trip to Australia, made under bail conditions pertaining to his ongoing F1 Singapore Grand Prix corruption case.

Prime Minster Lee has openly stated he wishes to step down as premier before the PAP’s 70th anniversary in November and the next general election the next year, leading to suspicions the charges against Singh could be one of his final moves to clear the board for whatever he would consider as a “smooth transition of power” from himself to his party-anointed successor, Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong.