Criminal Law (Temporary Provisions) Act (Singapore) - History

History

The first version of the Criminal Law (Temporary Provisions) Act ("CLTPA") was enacted as the Criminal Law (Temporary Provisions) Ordinance 1955, when Singapore was a Crown colony of the British Empire. Notable portions of the Ordinance included Part III which aimed to control the movement of persons and vessels in the Straits of Johor, and was intended to assist the Federation of Malaya in denying supplies to Communist terrorists in the jungles of Johor. Part V made it necessary to give 14 days' notice of a strike or lock-out in an essential service to enable emergency arrangements to be made for ensuring a minimum service necessary for the well-being of the public. The Ordinance required renewal after three years.

In August 1958, the Ordinance was amended to provide for the preventive detention without trial of persons associated with criminal activities for up to six months. During the Second Reading of the Amendment Bill, the Chief Secretary of the Legislative Assembly of Singapore, Edgeworth Beresford David, said that such powers were needed to combat gang fights or other crimes committed by secret society members, particularly violent conflict between such societies. He noted that while in 1954 there had been 30 secret society gang fights, by 1957 the number had risen to 150, and in the first six months of 1958 there had already been 157 fights – double the rate for the previous year. Such fights were difficult for the police to detect and to prosecute, as eyewitnesses were too frightened of reprisals to furnish information leading to the arrests of gang members. He said:

It is in these circumstances that the Government has decided that more drastic steps must be taken to protect the public from the activities of these gangs, and that since, for the reasons I have given, it is not possible to achieve that protection through the normal judicial processes of the Courts, these safeguards, which are adequate in ordinary times, must, in the present abnormal crime-wave, be supplemented by executive action. It is not only the duty of the Government to do this in discharge of its primary responsibility for the maintenance of peace and good order, but I believe that there is a wide public demand that such action should be taken and that it will meet with wholehearted support from all law-abiding members of the community.

The Chief Secretary emphasized that the powers to detain without trial were not intended to be used indiscriminately. Rather, they were designed to deal with ringleaders of gangs and those primarily responsible for their activities, to break the organizations of gangs and prevent their leaders from coercing less vicious members of their gangs as well as the general public. Further, the Government was introducing the powers as a temporary measure to meet an immediate threat, and they would not be retained as soon as the circumstances were such that the threat no longer existed. The Amendment Bill was supported by Lee Kuan Yew, then Member of Parliament for Tanjong Pagar, who said:

Let us face the facts: either we bring these gangsters to trial, or we do nothing, or we lock them up without trial. Well, we prefer to bring them to trial if we could. As I know, and I think every practising lawyer in town knows, the point is now reached when police officers frankly admit that gangsters are not scared of the police any more. ... Now quite frankly either you surrender and say, well, the judicial process is inadequate and therefore we have been beaten by gangsters, or we say, well what do we do about it? I say, well, if there is no other way, then we had better deal with them firmly.

After Singapore became a self-governing state within the British Empire, in September 1959 the Ordinance was amended again to extend the period of detention from six to 12 months, to give the Minister for Home Affairs the power to place persons associated with criminal activities under police supervision as an alternative to detention, and to impose special restrictions on persons under police supervision and special penalties on them for breaking the restrictions or being convicted of specified offences. The Ordinance, which was due to expire in October of that year, was also extended for a five-year period. From that time, the Act has been extended every five years, remaining on the statute books after Singapore's full independence in 1965. The statute has been renewed 12 times since 1955, most recently on 13 February 2009, and is presently in force till 20 October 2014.

In 1998, Lee Kuan Yew, who by then had served as Prime Minister for over 40 years between 1959 and 1990 and was Senior Minister of Singapore at the time, reiterated his support for the law:

It must be realised that if you abolish the powers of arrest and detention and insist on trial in open court in accordance with the strict laws of evidence of a criminal trial, then law and order becomes without the slightest exaggeration utterly impossible, because whilst you may still nominally have law and order, the wherewithal to enforce it would have disappeared. The choice in many of these cases is either to go through the motions of a trial and let a guilty man off to continue his damage to society or to keep him confined without trial.

The CLTPA was termed "draconian legislation" in a 2004 article by the Asian Centre for Human Rights, and in its 2006 manifesto the Workers' Party of Singapore called for the Act to be re-examined to determine whether it is still necessary in today's context. It has also been suggested by an academic that the power to detain without trial in the Act is unconstitutional as it is not authorized by Articles 149 and 150 of the Constitution of Singapore and is outside the common law legislative power of Parliament.