Freedom of Speech in Singapore

Freedom of speech is a precious thing and is as important as the right to self-ownership. In Singapore, freedom of speech has never been encouraged. Though the country's jurisdiction provided formal legal guarantee of freedom of speech to the citizens, it is not implemented. It was never encouraged by anyone. People are not allowed to discuss political matters and even media faced this repression.

Though the freedom of speech has been improved a bit in recent times, it is still far from that of western countries.

Now a days, People are speaking more freely about things which they didn't dare to speak in earlier days. They are speaking out on topics which earlier were repressed to speak about. This change in people's way of expressing their views freely on politics and any other topic is a striking development.

Economic crisis can be considered as the main reason for this as it has encouraged people to be more critical towards the government. The other reasons are improved education, more people traveling abroad, and wide access to television and foreign publications.

Earlier, Singapore government had opined about the freedom of speech, press and assembly practiced in western countries as inappropriate for Singapore, or to be precise, for the southeast Asian countries. They showed rural poverty, racial and religious disputes, backwardness and other characteristics as the possible consequences of the freedom of speech and press.

But many people challenged it as the self-serving argument and many people were in a opinion that the government is trying to fool them. People started telling the government not to treat them like stupids. But there was no immediate change in the 'rules'. Even journalists used to get a dressing down from the government officials if they wrote any article against government or about any controversial topic.

When Anwar Ibrahim's case was under trail, officials prodded the newspapers to give full coverage of the story. This prompted the newspapers to cross all the political and social barriers and to start open discussions about many topics, many of which even embarrassed the authorities.

Singapore which always projected importance over Asian values has understood that those Asian values are changing with time and they realized that there is no need to stick to the rules which were implemented based on the values which were changed now.

The government which earlier limited the freedom of speech to courts is now thinking about establishing places where people could speak their minds out without getting a permission to do so.

Freedom of speech should always be allowed and it is a very important right to humanity. It could be repressed only in the cases where it proves to be dangerous and deteriorating.

Though the freedom of speech in Singapore is limited, it has seen a lot of improvement in the past decade. People who earlier were scared of discussing few topics are speaking about them freely. But there is still a need to see improvement in the freedom of speech and freedom of press. Hope we may see it in coming decade.