Trial About Article Begins in Singapore

The Singapore government on Monday began an unusual criminal case against an American university lecturer and a U.S.-owned newspaper for publishing commentary that argued that some regimes in Asia use their judiciary to bankrupt political opponents.

The academic, Christopher Lingle, has refused to return to Singapore from his home in Atlanta to answer the charges against him and has submitted no defense in writing.

Also accused of contempt of court are Michael Richardson, an Australian who is the Singapore-based Asia editor of the International Herald Tribune; Richard McClean, the Paris-based publisher of the newspaper; the Singapore distributor of the paper, and the Singapore company that prints the newspaper’s Southeast Asia editions.

The International Herald Tribune, which is jointly owned by the New York Times and the Washington Post, is published in Paris and distributed around the world. It sells 4,000 copies a day in Singapore.

After a day of preliminary courtroom arguments, Justice Goh Joon Seng ruled that the government had established a prima facie case of contempt and said the trial would proceed next Tuesday. Contempt of court is a criminal offense punishable by a jail term, a fine or both.

The U.S. State Department has expressed disappointment at what it called the “apparent attempt” by Singapore’s authorities to intimidate Lingle and the newspaper, and a number of U.S. newspapers have published editorials deriding Singapore for its sensitivity to press criticism. The Singapore government has rejected arguments that the case was about freedom of the press and insisted that it was about the integrity of its justice system.

In addition to the contempt case, Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of modern Singapore, has filed a civil suit against Lingle and the International Herald Tribune for defamation.

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The contempt case is the latest in a series of disputes that have marred relations between Singapore’s authoritarian government and Washington, formerly close allies. The disagreements began in March when a Singapore court sentenced an American teen-ager to be flogged for vandalizing cars.

Lingle was a senior lecturer at the National University of Singapore at the time the article was published in October. He resigned his job halfway through a two-year contract rather than stay in Singapore and face the charges.

The dispute centers on a single phrase in Lingle’s article, in which he wrote:

“Intolerant regimes in the region reveal considerable ingenuity in their methods of suppressing dissent. Some techniques lack finesse: crushing unarmed students with tanks, or imprisoning dissidents. Others are more subtle: relying upon a compliant judiciary to bankrupt opposition politicians, or buying out enough of the opposition to take control ‘democratically.’ ”

Singapore Atty. Gen. Chan Sek Keong told the court that it was well known that government politicians in Singapore have sued opposition politicians for defamation, winning damages that result in bankruptcy filings. “There is no other such country,” he said.

Lingle’s use of the words “compliant judiciary” was seen by the government as a suggestion that Singapore judges are part of a “subtle scheme” to bankrupt dissidents rather than deciding cases on their merits.

The attorney for Richardson replied that the editor had believed that the paragraph in question referred to China, Myanmar or Vietnam and not to Singapore and that a reasonable reader of the article might also reach a similar conclusion.

McClean, the newspaper’s distributor in Singapore and the printer all said they were unaware of the article’s contents before it was published. Last month, the newspaper published a full apology to Lee and the Singapore judicial system, but both the contempt prosecution and the Lee libel suit proceeded anyway.

While Lingle has not prepared a defense, he wrote in a November opinion piece in The Times that “if a simple newspaper article is interpreted as a serious threat to a regime that has held power for nearly 30 years, then the government admits to occupying a house of glass built upon a weak foundation.”

The concept of contempt of court used in Singapore derives from the British system of justice and is rarely used. While most American judges threaten contempt to compel certain behavior, the British system has a second meaning: punishing individuals who “scandalize” the courts with criticism of the administration of justice.

The Singapore government acknowledged that the Lingle case is unique because it is the first case ever brought in which the location of the court system being criticized was in dispute.

Lee received unspecified damages from the same newspaper in an out-of-court settlement last year for the publication of an opinion page article that suggested Lee was practicing “dynastic politics” in Singapore.