Parliament votes Tuesday — five minutes could put a question on the record
Dear Supporters,
You signed this petition because you believe decisions about the health of Singaporeans should be made in Singapore, by people who answer to Singaporeans. There is a Bill before Parliament on Tuesday that bears on that directly — not about any foreign body, but about how much of this stays under Parliament’s eye at all.
On Tuesday 8 September, 3 Days from now, Parliament takes the second reading of the Health Sciences Authority (Amendment) and Other Matters Bill. It moves the Biological Agents and Toxins Act — the law governing who may possess Singapore’s most dangerous pathogens — and the Human Biomedical Research Act, our law of consent for research on human beings, into the office of HSA’s Chief Executive. In 66 pages, the word “appeal” does not appear once.
The part that speaks to sovereignty is this. The Bill gives HSA a role in administering or enforcing eleven other Acts, including the Termination of Pregnancy Act, the Voluntary Sterilisation Act, the Human Cloning and Other Prohibited Practices Act, the Human Organ Transplant Act and the Infectious Diseases Act. And it allows the Minister to assign HSA further functions, or to amend that list of Acts, by Gazette notification rather than by bringing a fresh Bill to Parliament. Sovereignty is not only about who outside our borders has a say. It is about whether our own Parliament keeps the say — and a power that grows by notification is a power that grows without a debate.
I have written it up as three case studies.
Case study one — 2003: the warning, and the benchmark. SARS escaped a laboratory in Singapore and a doctoral student at NUS was infected. A review panel found the records so poor that basic questions could not be answered, and that Singapore had no legislated biosafety standards at all. Our Parliament answered that by enacting the Biological Agents and Toxins Act 2005 — our law, made here. It is that Act this Bill now moves. The standards it set: complete records, a documented chain of custody, certification audited by accredited external auditors, and people able to raise concerns “without the threat of punishment”.
Case study two — January 2022: the standards, tested on a person. Ten and a half hours of an interview, off the record, in the criminal proceedings in which I am an accused person. Those proceedings are ongoing and no finding has been made. Nothing in the account asks you to decide my guilt or anyone else’s, and I make no allegation of wrongdoing against any person. What I write about is process: I have taken the 2003 panel’s four requirements and measured against them what prosecution witnesses said themselves, under oath, in open court.
Case study three — 2024: the remedy, tested in court. When my husband and I asked the High Court to make HSA act on the advertising rules, the court accepted that HSA is under no duty to enforce and no duty to prosecute, and that a citizen with a general concern that the law be observed is, in law, a busybody. Costs of $12,000 were ordered against us. So the standards exist, and there is no one a citizen can require to enforce them.
I am not asking Parliament to reject this Bill. I am asking Parliament to pause it until these questions have real, public answers on the record.
Read all three: healingthedivide.cc/warning
Write to your MP before Tuesday — five minutes, with a letter ready to copy: healingthedivide.cc/writetomp
An MP who receives a letter from a constituent can raise the point in the chamber. Once a question is asked in Parliament it is on the record permanently, whatever the vote. That is worth more than any number of signatures.
Thank you for signing, and for reading this far.
Iris Koh
5 years on, and still standing and still speaking. To support this work: healingthedivide.cc/report