Human Rights And The Government Baby Incentives – Part 1

In recent weeks, we have seen public discussion on two apparently unrelated topics. The first topic was human rights. AG Walter Woon sparked off that discussion with his controversial comments associating human rights with hypocrisy and fanaticism:

“Noting that human rights is “now a religion among some people”, he said: “You have, like in some religions, the fanatics. And it’s all hypocrisy and fanaticism (for these people) to set the views, as the leading spokesmen, of what is acceptable and what’s not.”

The second topic was about how to get Singaporeans to have more babies. MM Lee Kuan Yew started that discussion when he revealed that (1) the government is planning to introduce new procreation incentives, and (2) we would seek to use countries like Sweden and Norway as our models.

At first glance, these two topics – human rights and childbirth – seem quite separate. After all, aren’t human rights just all that silly nonsense spouted by Chee Soon Juan and other clowns? As for babies, well, that’s a serious matter, for babies are our economic defence against the perils of a rapidly aging population. Right?

Here’s a curious point which the Singapore government has missed (or has chosen to be silent about). On the procreation issue, we now seek to use the Nordic countries as our model. But we haven’t realized that their parenthood policies are actually quite significantly influenced by human rights considerations. And this is quite true of European countries in general.

How so? Well, for example, let’s look at a rather well-known human rights treaty - the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW, for short). The treaty tackles a range of issues relating to women, including pregnancy, motherhood, maternity leave, childcare support, and the involvement of fathers in raising children. Article 11 says:

2. In order to prevent discrimination against women on the grounds of marriage or maternity and to ensure their effective right to work, States Parties shall take appropriate measures:

(a) To prohibit, subject to the imposition of sanctions, dismissal on the grounds of pregnancy or of maternity leave and discrimination in dismissals on the basis of marital status;

(b) To introduce maternity leave with pay or with comparable social benefits without loss of former employment, seniority or social allowances;

(c) To encourage the provision of the necessary supporting social services to enable parents to combine family obligations with work responsibilities and participation in public life, in particular through promoting the establishment and development of a network of child-care facilities ....

Now if you are a country which takes human rights seriously, the fact that you are also a party to CEDAW will inevitably influence your national policies. CEDAW will lead you, as a state, to focus on the welfare of the mother, and the welfare of the child, and even the welfare of the father. And you will incline towards the view that just by the fact that a family is a family, there are certain rights its members ought to have. After all, they’re human.

However, if you are a country which likes to say “Oh, human rights are just an invention of the West; me, I’m Asian, and I’ll have nothing to do with those hypocritical human rights fanatics," then the fact that you’re a party to CEDAW doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

You may still want to support procreation, but the motivations are different. For example, the Singapore government seeks to promote higher baby production, but its motivations are purely economic; the aim is to generate a steady stream of future workers for Singapore Inc..

Then the conundrum becomes this. Babies are economically useless. This is undeniable. They can’t type; they don’t wash dishes; and for a long, long time, they definitely won’t be doing any life sciences research in a R&D laboratory. In fact, babies are very much like Temasek’s investment in Shin Corp or Merrill Lynch. One day, they might generate good returns, but that will have to be in the very, very distant future. Meanwhile, they are just a huge, constant and bleeding economic loss.

This is not an obstacle, if you view babies and parents as humans, and by virtue of being human, automatically having human rights (like those under CEDAW). But what happens if you view babies merely as future economic units, and women merely as economic-unit-producing machines? The question then becomes – do you, as a government, really dare to bite the bullet? And put your money and political will into this very long-term, risky investment?

So far, the government has failed. From the time that "Two is Enough" gave way to "Have Three If You Can Afford it", the government has never succeeded.

[To Be Continued]

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Caning As A Form of Punishment

ST May 23, 2008
25 Years 24 strokes
Man tries to retract his police statement but is convicted of raping stepdaughter
By Selina Lum

HE TOLD the police he did it.

He told a psychiatrist the same thing.

The 37-year-old IT specialist admitted to having had sex with his stepdaughter since she was 11, but that it had been consensual.

But when the case went to court, the Indian national changed his tune - insisting that there had been no sexual relations between them at all.

Yesterday, the High Court's decision was clear: He was guilty of all the charges brought against him for raping and having oral sex with the girl, now aged 14.

The Singapore permanent resident, who cannot be named to protect the girl's identity, was jailed for 25 years and ordered to be caned the maximum 24 strokes.

I have very little sympathy for child rapists. In my opinion, raping a child is just one of the most evil sorts of crimes possible.

I just wanted to use the ST article as a starting point for a more general discussion - whether our criminal legal system should continue to use caning as a form of punishment. Needless to say, human rights organisations such as Amnesty International regard caning as "cruel and unusual punishment", which is the technical way of saying that caning is a breach of human rights.

Some months ago, a friend alerted me to a Youtube video which purportedly shows the actual caning of a convicted child rapist in Malaysia. I would suppose that caning in Singapore would be somewhat similar (that is, the IT specialist mentioned in the ST article will suffer a similar fate).

Anyway here's the video. Please do not watch if you are squeamish. The caning takes place at a leisurely pace, but by the end of 20 strokes, the flesh on the buttocks is torn into a quivering, bloody mess.



Link to Youtube.

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Things You’ll Never Catch Lee Kuan Yew Saying

ST Feb 19, 2008
'I have too much power,' says Aussie minister

SYDNEY - AUSTRALIA'S new immigration minister surprised a senate committee by saying he had too much power and was uncomfortable 'playing God' with people's lives.

Mr Chris Evans' statement on Tuesday came after a series of scandals over the treatment of migrants by the conservative government of former prime minister John Howard, ousted by the centre-left Labor Party in November elections.

Mr Evans said there had been a big increase in ministerial intervention in individual migration cases during the Howard government and in some cases people had no right to appeal.

'I have formed the view that I have too much power,' he told the senate's legal and constitutional affairs committee.

'The (migration) act is unlike any other act I've seen in terms of the power given to the minister to make decisions about individual cases.

'I am uncomfortable with that, not just because of concern about playing God, but also because of the lack of transparency and accountability for those decisions.'

Mr Evans' predecessor last year controversially used his powers to revoke the visa of Indian doctor Mohamed Haneef and force him to leave the country even after a terrorism charge against him was dropped.

Mr Evans said he was considering an ombudsman's report that called for reforms to ministerial powers, including his ability to revoke the visas of long-term permanent residents.

I wonder how many people in Singapore still remember ex-SIA pilot Ryan Goh. Back in 2003, SIA pilots were very unhappy about their salaries and they had some disputes with their union over how the issue was being handled. Ryan was apparently one of the SIA pilots who played an active role in the whole episode.

Up till then, Ryan had lived in Singapore for 26 years. He was married and had four children. He was a permanent resident.

Lee Kuan Yew promptly kicked him out of Singapore, more or less overnight. The Singapore authorities suddenly declared Ryan Goh an “undesirable resident”, and his PR status was revoked.

Well, I guess that’s one good thing about being a Singapore citizen. They can’t boot you out of the country just like that.

(Of course, they can always still lock you away on Sentosa. Maybe for the next 32 years or so).

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A New Record for Singapore?

Singapore could be the world's most vocal advocate for the death penalty.

ST Nov 17, 2007
UN resolution calls for capital punishment to be suspended
Singapore leads the charge against non-binding resolution that polarises members

UNITED NATIONS - A UNITED Nations General Assembly committee has passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on executions with the ultimate goal of abolishing the practice.

The non-binding resolution was given the green light on Thursday after two days of fractious and often bad-tempered debate - with Italy leading the anti-execution camp and Singapore heading the charge for the other side.

The draft proposal was introduced by 87 countries, including 27 European Union (EU) states.

In the end, 99 countries voted for a suspension of capital punishment worldwide, 52 voted against and 33 abstained.

In arguing against the resolution, Singapore said capital punishment is a criminal law issue which should be left to countries to decide.

Singapore's permanent representative to the UN, Mr Vanu Gopala Menon, said ahead of the vote that the EU co-sponsors were trying 'to impose a particular set of beliefs on everyone else'.

'How else can this behaviour be described other than as sanctimonious, hypocritical and intolerant,' he said.

"You are so intolerant!" Mr Menon cries out to 99 countries in the world. "Why won't you let me kill people just the way I please." No doubt Mr Menon would think that I am sanctimonious, hypocritical and intolerant too. After all, I am against the death penalty.

There are so many worthy causes in the world that Singapore could potentially champion. Singapore could, for example, use the United Nations to lobby for more coordinated international action to deal with global warming - this is very relevant for us, since rising sea levels pose a threat especially to small island states.

Instead we go to the United Nations, and we forcefully devote our energies into arguing for our sovereign right to kill people. How shameful - and stupid.

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Dr Thio Li Ann's Infamous Speech

Recently, NMP Thio Li-Ann received what she described as "hate mail". Personally I would describe it as karma.

Looking around the Internet, it appears that a great number of Singaporeans do find Thio Li-Ann's own behaviour quite hateful. Click here, here, here, here, here and here, for a few examples.

What happened? Last week Thio Li-Ann had gone to Parliament on a mission to attack the rights of gay people. I believe that she set a new national record. Her now-infamous speech has probably made her the most intensely disliked NMP in the entire history of Singapore. Among gays and straights.

I am quite serious. Which other Nominated Member of Parliament, past or present, has ever attracted such a storm of angry, negative comments from the general public of Singapore? You tell me.

Even the respectable, gentlemanly Dr Cherian George from NTU (also Stanford, Columbia and Cambridge University) could not find a single good thing to say about Thio Li-Ann's speech. Here's Cherian, in his own words:

" .... more distressing than the final result of the debate was the retrogressive speech by the high-flying legal scholar Thio Li-Ann. Her convoluted, caricatured rendering of political philosophy and comparative politics needed to be corrected by good political science, but she got away with it in Parliament. Her theories about what constitutes a minority could have been debunked by any graduate student of sociology or anthropology, but this did not stop her.

Then there was Thio’s tasteless digs at homosexual sex, which some of her comrades considered witty, but really deserved no place in the highest forum in the land. Thio has been celebrated for supposedly speaking up for the silent majority. This is an insult to the majority, most of whom have the basic decency to know the difference between what should be uttered in public and what should be confined to close friends or private blogs.

Thio also did a disservice to the majority of God-fearing Singaporeans – we who would like to believe that our faiths are ultimately about compassion, not the hateful, hurtful cheap shots that Thio felt compelled to deliver on our behalf. How I wished a theology professor or other religious scholar would have stepped into the debate at that point, to show how it might be possible to express a faith-based objection to homosexuality – minus the hate speech .

"Hate speech". Wow, wow. Isn't that a rather harsh sin for one distinguished professor to accuse another distinguished professor of? I wish I could say that Cherian was exaggerating. Unfortunately I think that Cherian was just being his usual self. That is to say - very perceptive, very accurate and very precise with his choice of words.

See for yourself what hate speech means. Note how the term is legally defined under the laws of Ireland, Canada, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway - "... publicly making statements that threaten, ridicule or hold in contempt a group due to race, skin colour, national or ethnic origin, faith or sexual orientation" etc.

Then ask yourself whether Thio Li-Ann's parliamentary speech would have constituted a criminal offence, if she had made that speech in any of those countries. Although I, as an ex-Deputy Public Prosecutor, have prosecuted crimes only in Singapore, and not in any of those other countries, I personally think that the chances would be ... high!

And so this is a rather sad moment in the history of Singapore. Hate speech has made its own way into Parliament. For so many years, Singapore has placed significant restraints on the freedom of speech, supposedly as a trade-off for ensuring the greater good of social harmony and peace. Yet hate speech has managed to make its own way into Parliament.

And according to reports, it even gained the noisy, boisterous support of some chair-thumping PAP Members of Parliament.

What happened? Where did we go wrong? What a sad moment this is, for Singapore. Prime Minister Lee, you should consider reviewing the selection process for NMPs.

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