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In light of the recent judgement on the issue of Section 377A by our courts, the following article by NUS professor Michael Hor on the topic is worth re-reading. The article was first published on The Online Citizen here in 2007.

By Michael Hor

Curiously, the Penal Code (Amendment) Bill of 2007, proclaimed as the result of only the second comprehensive review of Singapore’s 136 year old criminal code, is likely to be remembered more for what it did not do than for what it did.

To be sure, there is much reform in the Bill, and much that is uncontroversially needed. Many of the changes are technical in nature and would require some acquaintance with the intricacies of criminal law to appreciate.

Not so the issue of whether consensual gay sexual activity between adults ought to continue to be criminalized. When the proposed amendments were unveiled in November last year, few other matters in the document so dominated public discourse. Yet after many months, much feedback and careful deliberation, nothing has changed.

The now famous, or infamous, section 377A which prohibits “gross indecency” between men, is to be preserved. The press release in conjunction with the introduction of the Bill contains no more than two cryptic sentences explaining why this position was finally taken.

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.

***

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.