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The following is a note first published on Ms De Rozario's Facebook page. We thank her for allowing us to re-publish it here.

By Tania De Rozario

"...it is not that the courts do not have any role to play in defining moral issues when such issues are at stake. However, the courts’ power to intervene can only be exercised with established principles. The issue in the present case no doubt is challenging and important, but it is not one which, in my view, justifies heavy-handed judicial intervention ahead of democratic change." - Singapore High Court Justice Quentin Loh.

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When Mathew Shepard was murdered in Wyoming in 1998, I was 17. I got the news from a close friend who had recently relocated to the US to pursue her education. She was in the process of coming out and wept over the phone, after having attended a candlelight vigil her school had held.

The crime affected me deeply. Shepard, 21, was killed because he was gay. He was driven to a deserted field by two men, tied to a fence, and beaten unconscious with a handgun. When he was spotted the next day by a passerby, he was still unconscious - so badly beaten that he was initially mistaken for a scarecrow. His injuries were too serious to be operated on. He died in hospital.

The following is a letter by Mr Vincent Law was sent to the TODAY newspaper, which declined to publish it. The letter was also sent to the Straits Times.

Last week, AG Steven Cheong launched an initiative to help prosecutors, noting that the public is now more willing to scrutinise prosecutorial decisions and issued a timely reminder that prosecutors should exercise greater care and consideration in making those decisions as they “have the potential to deeply affect an accused person’s life, and in particular his individual rights and liberties” to avoid “unmeritorious prosecutions and consequently undermine public confidence in the criminal justice system.”

While welcomed, it is worth considering why the general public is now more vocal and willing to express disagreement or dissatisfaction with some of those decisions.

A case in point is the recent judgement on the four ex-SMRT drivers from China who "received jail terms of between six and seven weeks for instigating an illegal strike last November that caused inconvenience to the public."

By Woo Wei Ling

We die how we live—that is one of the subtexts of the new documentary Bukit Brown Voices. The film opens with shots of densely packed HDB blocks, and ends with footage of Mandai Columbarium, where a family cremates a relative’s exhumed remains; tiny cubicles for the living and the dead respectively are stacked in seemingly endless and sterile geometric constructions, mirroring each other. But between these filmic bookends, the star of the film is Bukit Brown, the 200-hectare, jungle-like Chinese cemetery located in the heart of Singapore’s urban cityscape.

Today marks the start of Qing Ming and the final tomb-sweeping festival before nearly 4000 graves are officially exhumed at the cemetery to make way for an 8-lane expressway, which will change the landscape of Singapore’s oldest Chinese cemetery—and the largest outside of China—forever. One year ago, filmmakers Brian McDairmant and Su-Mae Khoo sought to capture the last graveside tomb-sweeping rituals for some families who would be affected by the exhumation order, and the resultant footage became Bukit Brown Voices.

By AWARE (Association of Women for Action and Research)

AWARE welcomes Minister Chan Chun Sing’s recent statements on abortion, affirming that the decision whether to terminate a pregnancy or bring it to term is a highly personal one, which can only be made by each pregnant person for themselves.

We refer to the Straits Times article, “From adoption to abortion” (March 17). The article reported that experts felt “the law could be changed to make those seeking abortion think harder and longer” and that the process of dealing with patients seeking abortion should aim to “persuade more to keep their babies”.

Laws and procedures on abortion should have no aim other than to protect the rights and health of patients, and definitely should not interfere with patients’ reproductive freedom in the name of national agendas to increase fertility.