Comment

INTERESTINGLY, William Safire's op-ed essay, The Misrule of Law: Singapore's legal racket, (New York Times: Op-ed, June 1) puts another perspective to this most squalid affair.

To say the judges jump whenever Lee Kuan Yew sues is only half the picture. Indeed, in jumping they execute breathtaking feats of contortion, bending over backwards to allow Lee to deliver lengthy political pulpitry from the witness box, deny and dismiss the defence interlocutory applications, and award absurd amounts for so-called defamation.

In truth, lawyer Tang Liang Hong made an unexceptional speech some years ago urging Chinese intellectuals to emulate their Christian colleagues, which passed largely unnoticed, but Lee -- just a few days before polling day -- found it expediently objectionable labelling Tang an "anti-English-educated Chinese chauvinist," whose views were a threat to the survival of Singapore, and whose return as a member of parliament would contribute to its destabilization.

In any other judicial system, it is more than moot whether a court would hold Tang's campaign rhetoric and his specific retort to this arrant nonsense defamatory of Lee and his PAP cohorts, but, in Singapore, if the oracular Lee says of a political opponent he is a Chinese chauvinist, or whatever, then he is. Period. To respond, as Tang did, by saying that it was a lie was to call Lee a liar, and is actionable defamation.

High court judges are paid S$700,000 a year plus a minimum of 3 months' bonus, excluding other perks and privileges. The chief justice receives S$1.4 million a year, excluding other perks and privileges of office. His total salary exceeds the combined stipends of the Lord Chancellor of England, the Chief Justices of the United States, Australia and Canada.

As a Queen's Counsel once asked: "Is this kind of money a salary or an income of permanent bribery?" Given this kind of payment, judges not only jumped but asked deferentially, how high?

Where else in the world are multimillion dollar claims for alleged defamation commenced and completed within four and half months, with astronomical awards ordered against the absent defendant, whose repeated applications for adjournment to allow his English Queen's Counsel to visit Singapore to represent him, as indeed his other applications, refused and dismissed, as attempts to delay proceedings.

As the media has been subordinated to the primary purposeof the Singapore PAP government, so too, have the courts.