Parliament votes Tuesday — five minutes could put a question on the record
Dear Supporters,
This is a different subject, but it is the same question you signed about. When you wrote to SFA about the sixteen insect species, what you were really asking was: on what evidence was this decided, where is that written down, and can an ordinary person question it? I have spent two years putting that question to a different regulator, and there is a Bill before Parliament on Tuesday that makes the answer worse.
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, into the office of HSA’s Chief Executive. In 66 pages, the word “appeal” does not appear once.
Two things in it will interest you particularly. The Bill lets the Minister add to the list of Acts that HSA helps administer, or assign it new functions, by Gazette notification rather than by bringing a fresh Bill to Parliament — so the scope can grow without a debate. And it creates a new category of “auxiliary authorised officer”: private individuals, expressly not public officers, appointed to enter premises and demand documents. The Bill does not define “suitably qualified”, sets no published criteria, no register, no training standard, and gives a clinic or a business no route to complain about one. Obstructing such an officer carries up to $20,000 or two years’ imprisonment.
I have written the whole thing 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 convened at the Ministry of Health’s request, with the World Health Organization, found the records so poor that basic questions could not be answered, and that Singapore had no legislated biosafety standards at all — the finding that produced the Biological Agents and Toxins Act 2005, the very Act this Bill moves. The panel set out what this work requires: 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