Law Minister K. Shanmugam shed some light on the government’s decision to deport 53 workers who participated in the riot in Little India but against whom it appears no formal charges were filed in court. He is quoted as saying:
“If every case has got to go to court and a judge makes a decision, then repatriation decisions become judicial rather than administrative. Then every foreigner is entitled to stay here at taxpayers’ expense, housed here at taxpayers’ expense, it could stretch on a year or more.”
The statement, in the absence of further elaboration, is quite alarming on several counts particularly as it comes from the Minister of Law.
Granted, as the role of the Attorney-General’s Office is to represent the interests of the people, it routinely weighs the interests of the public in the pursuit of justice and exercises prosecutorial discretion in deciding whether or not to file charges, whom to charge, what charges to file and, if a conviction is obtained, what punishment it wishes to seek. However, when the AG decides it is not in the public interest to pursue charges against the suspects—in this case the 53 workers who are to be deported—it does not then follow that the suspects are guilty of lesser offences or are less culpable. The proper authority which determines guilt and culpability is the judiciary, not the executive branch. As no criminal proceedings have occurred, the workers should be considered innocent of any offences. And, if the workers are innocent, then it would be a deviation from international norm for the government, the legislative branch, to summarily declare the behaviour of these workers as criminal and to deport them. The act of deporting these workers and denying them re-entry into Singapore stigmatizes these workers and labels them as criminals without them having the opportunity to defend themselves.
Through his statement, the Minister does not seem to address the constitutionality or legality of the decision to deport the workers. He merely seems to state what he considers to be an expedient manner to deal with them. The comment would not be appropriate coming from any Minister or MP, least of all the Law Minister. Deportation should not be an administrative decision.
As an aside, it is interesting that the Minister prefers to use the gentler word, “repatriation”, instead of deportation. There are registered “repatriation companies” in Singapore whose job is to “facilitate” the return of migrant workers to their countries. Although these companies are often accused of abduction and forcibly deporting workers against their will, these companies are officially recognized as legally-registered companies offering valuable services to their clients, most of whom are small-time employers.
The Minister generalizes by stating that it would not be in the taxpayers’ interest for every case to make it to court. But, in this matter of the riot, it is not like “every case”. As the government itself has stated, rioting is a serious matter. And there is a high level of interest in the matter among Singaporeans. That makes this an extraordinary case. To suggest that taxpayers’ money should not be wasted prosecuting the 53 workers accused of participating in the riot may be considered by many to be trivializing the rioting incident.
The Minister perhaps erred in his choice of words—or was possibly misquoted—when he suggested that “every foreigner is entitled to stay here at taxpayers’ expense” if they were to be prosecuted. Surely, a foreigner who is facing the prospect of prosecution for rioting, which carries with it a stiff jail term and caning, would not be pressing for his entitlement to remain in Singapore at taxpayers’ expense. As nice as Singapore prisons are, he would have no choice but to stay in Singapore though he would prefer to flee.
Perhaps most alarming is the suggestion by the Minister that taxpayers’ money is the real concern with the matter of the deported workers who will not face charges despite their participation in an offence which the government and people take very seriously. There were previous suggestions by some that the same concern with taxpayers’ money was behind the decision to suspend the Coroner’s Inquiry for Dinesh Raman, who died while in police custody, despite the Constitution mandating a CI for such cases. What is perplexing with the Dinesh Raman case, is that the police and state prosecutors took almost 3 years to investigate the incident at considerable cost to taxpayers before deciding that it would no longer be in the interest of taxpayers to conduct a CI.
This may an appropriate time for the AG to explain and educate the public, perhaps through outreach programmes, the sorts of considerations that affect its decision to exercise prosecutorial discretion, the limits to such powers, and what checks and balances exist to ensure abuses of power are prevented in the exercise of these powers. One hopes that these explanations would prevent people forming the erroneous notion that the concern that a criminal being “housed here at taxpayers’ money” is the reason why the death penalty exists in Singapore. The outreach initiatives could also result in fewer instances of the judiciary being scandalized as more people become aware of the point at which the judiciary starts to feel prickly.
Masked Crusader