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RSF
blasts Singapore in Annual Report 2008
Reporters
Without Borders (RSF)
13 Feb
08
http://www.rsf.org
Singapore
Area:
620 sq. km.
Population:
4,450,000.
Languages:
English, Mandarin, Malay, Tamil.
Head
of government:
Lee Hsien Loong.
A "worthy" successor to his
father, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has done nothing to loosen
state control over the media. Journalists have a great deal more
freedom to cover international news than local affairs. And a
political documentary was hit by censorship.
The
authorities continued their trial of strength with the magazine
the Far
Eastern Economic Review
(FEER), which has been banned from distribution in the country
since 2006, but which is still available online. A court in June
rejected a request from the prominent Hong Kong-based monthly to
be defended by a British lawyer in a "defamation" trial
opened against it last year by Lee Hsien Loong and his father.
The judge considered that the suit was not sufficiently "complex"
for the lawyer in question. Lee Hsien Loong and his father Lee
Kuan Yew took exception to an article in the FEER about
opposition leader Chee Soon Juan, whom it termed a "martyr
of the country" because of a raft of legal proceedings he
has had to face.
The opposition, particularly the
Singapore Democratic Party (SDP), bête
noire
of the regime, is rarely quoted in the media and dissident voices
have to resort to using the Internet to express themselves.
The
authorities in April declared a sentence of up to two years in
jail and a heavy fine would be imposed on anyone suspected of
possessing or broadcasting a copy of the documentary "Zahari's
17 years",
about the 17-year imprisonment of journalist and opposition
figure Said Zahari. The film-maker, Martyn See, was forced to
hand over the original and copies of the documentary to the
ministry of information communications and the arts. In the film,
the former editor of the newspaper Utusan Melayu recounts why the
government of the time, headed by the father of the current
premier, arrested him in 1963 along with several of his
associates, under a draconian internal security law. The ministry
said "Zahari's
17 years"
threatened "public confidence in the government".
Martyn See's films can be viewed on the Internet.
A
correspondent for Reuters
in Singapore, Mia Shanley was forced to reveal the source for one
of her stories after two companies took action against the
British news agency and the newspapers The
Straits Times and
The
Business Times
to force them to reveal the sources for articles dating back to
November 2006. The courts systematically returned verdicts in
favour of companies, undermining the protection of sources in the
country.
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