Laws of our land Part III: Sedition Act & Racism

A lot of us (me included, though I’ve sus­pected for awhile) found out this morn­ing that if you make a racist com­ment on a forum or a blog and you can be charged under the Sedi­tion Act.

In fact, there are a vari­ety of things you could do on your blog that might be con­strued as an act with a sedi­tious ten­dency (s.3.1), even this blog post, if I’m not care­ful, and in my stream of con­scious­ness, end up writ­ing things that “raise dis­con­tent or dis­af­fec­tion amongst the cit­i­zens of Sin­ga­pore or the res­i­dents in Sin­ga­pore” (s.3.1(d))

So, the fel­las charged this morn­ing allegedly made racist remarks on an open forum and on a website/blog, and would have been charged under ss. 4.1©, 4.2, 3.1(e). (Any­one with detailed infor­ma­tion, please leave com­ments or trackback).

I’ll say now that I’m all against racism and racist remarks online and off, and that regard­less of the law, I think it is repul­sive and wrong­ful behaviour.

And as regards the law, out­law­ing racism is obvi­ously not unique to Sin­ga­pore. There are the Aus­tralian anti-racial vil­i­fi­ca­tion laws (e.g. Racial Vil­i­fi­ca­tion Act 1996 (South Aus­tralia), where you will find that the pun­ish­ments are quite severe, even when com­pared with our very own Sedi­tion Act.

Even as I write this post as quickly as I can, newswires around the world have already or are about to pick up on the scream­ing head­line ‘Blog­gers Charged With Sedi­tion in Sin­ga­pore’, (with Steven McDer­mott prob­a­bly sharp­en­ing his scis­sors and thick­en­ing his glue for a bit of cut and paste action as I write), which as you can see, isn’t really the issue.

For mine, the issue is a pub­lic rela­tions related one. We have laws to pro­tect against racism, and while these laws ain’t broke, they sure could do with a lit­tle pol­ish­ing. Enact an anti-racial vil­i­fi­ca­tion law, fel­las. Leave the Sedi­tion Act for spe­cific sedi­tious acts against the State.

[Series: Laws of our land Part II, Part I]

Surf stop: Tomorrow.sg: Two blog­gers charged under Sedi­tion Act over racist remarks

Tech­no­rati Tags: blog, racism, sedi­tion, Sin­ga­pore