Editorial
FILIPINOS must realize that a number of us would not mind if our social and governmental system became something like that of Singapore.
If you have close friends in Singapore, most of them will tell you their enjoyment of human rights sucks. But if you told them you admired the way Lee Kuan Yew and his People’s Action Party created the Singapore social and governmental system, and then pointed out to them how lucky they are for their prosperity, successful economy, peace and order, general orderliness, educational system and welfare state entitlements, they will agree that they are indeed benefiting a lot from having surrendered the “fun” we Filipinos have in our noisy Western-style democracy for all the blessings of a disciplined, stable, rich, corruption-free First-World country .
Singapore is a parliamentary republic and a constitutionally proclaimed representative democracy.
Elections in Singapore have been clean and fair ever since Britain gave it independence in 1959.
Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party has been in almost total control of parliament. Opposition parties exist. But it was only in the last election, in 2011, that the Workers’ Party-led opposition won as much as six of the 87 elected seats. There are some 11 or so non-constituency MPs.
The Singapore legal system is basically the British system but there is no trial by jury. Judges are appointed and hold fixed terms. They are generally known to be men and women of high moral and intellectual caliber. Singapore’s penal code includes judicially ordered corporal punishment, caning with a rattan whip, which is meted to rapists, rioters, vandals and illegal immigrants. The mandatory death penalty is imposed on those found guilty of murder (like our Flor Contemplacion), drug-trafficking and possession of firearms.
Amnesty International claims some of Singapore’s laws violate the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. AI may be right that per capita (of the population not of death row convicts) “Singapore possibly has the highest execution rate in the world.”
The Singapore Government of course rejects AI’s claims. The fact is that Singapore does not fare badly in Freedom House’s assessment.
And—this is something that many citizens of other countries envy— Singapore is rated—in PEW and other surveys of what businessmen in the region think—as equal to Hong Kong in having the most admired judicial and legal system in Asia. The 2010 World Justice Project Rule of Law Index placed Singapore as No. 1 in “order and security” and “access to civil justice.”
Bayan Muna, Karapatan, PISTON, Kilusan Mayo Uno, Samahang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas, the National Students’ League, the National Union of Students and other organizations that often mount protest marches would not be able to function in Singapore.
Carrying on colonial British public order laws, in Singapore, under the Public Order Act 2009, public demonstrations all require police permits, which are seldom given to groups that are known to be militants and have had scuffles with police before.
Can President Aquino be a Lee Kuan Yew?
We have mused on Singapore’s enviable economic success, stability and order because of the phenomenon that Senator Joker Arroyo, in November last year called, “creeping martial law” and “creeping totalitarianism.”
He was remarking on the President’s alter ego in the Justice department Sec. Leila de Lima’s decision to disregard a Supreme Court Temporary Restraining Order on the DOJ’s travel ban on former President Gloria Arroyo and her husband Mike Arroyo. Whether the SC’s TRO was really in force or not is the subject of a sub-plot in the Senate impeachment trial of Chief Justice Renato Corona. But last November the threat to our human rights and the tendency to make the Supreme Court an object of derision and contempt instead of respect were undeniable.
What Sec. Leila de Lima, with the President’s approval, did shocked constitutionalists, senators and some Rule-of-Law minded congressmen, law school deans and the more reflective columnists.
They saw a growing threat to the human-rights and democracy biased Constitution of 1987 and the danger to our republic’s stability with the diminution of the honor and dignity of the Supreme Court.
President of the Philippine Constitution Association Manuel Lazaro sounded the alarm that De Lima’s defiance of the Supreme Court’s TRO was “dangerous and destructive of the Rule of Law…” and “ might usher in the beginning of the end of the constitutionally ordained system of checks and balances in government.”
Recent developments, most especially what happened to Congressman Tobias Tiangco of Navotas—whom the House leaders tried to browbeat also point to the possibility that President Aquino, with the support of more than two-thirds of the members of the House of Representatives and a majority in the Senate can shake up our social, political and judicial system.
He and his closest advisers can move us toward a Singapore-like authoritarianism, which some political philosophers call “totalitarian democracy.” This can happen when the public is made to continue giving massive landslide election victories to the governing party whose declared policy is to dispense with “messy” people participation in governance.
Exponents of totalitarian democracy openly admit that listening to people with limited education and knowledge of government and policy issues is what is wrong with liberal democracies.
But does authoritarian democracy require a party of intellectually and ethically superior men of politics?
Would Singapore’s experiment have worked without Lee Kuan Yew as its father and principal worker?
(The Editor wrote this piece without benefit of prior knowledge that our banner would be Chief Justice Corona’s likening President Aquino to the late President Ferdinand Marcos.)
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