Parliament votes Tuesday — five minutes could put a question on the record
Dear Supporters,
You signed this petition because twelve people made a police report and asked for an investigation, and because you wanted that request to go somewhere rather than into a drawer. This update is about what I found when I tested exactly that — whether a citizen can require a regulator to act — and about a Bill before Parliament on Tuesday that makes the answer harder.
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.
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 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. Records. Chain of custody. Independent scrutiny. Informed consent.
Case study three — 2024: the remedy, tested in court. This is the one that answers your question. In June 2024 my husband and I asked the High Court to compel HSA to act on the advertising rules. We lost, and what matters is why. State Counsel submitted, and the court accepted, that HSA may order a corrective measure but is under no duty to enforce and no duty to prosecute; and that we had no standing to ask, because a citizen with a general concern that the law be observed is, in law, a busybody. HSA told the court it had investigated the matter — but what it found, and why it went no further, was never published, and the court confirmed nobody is entitled to make it say. Costs of $12,000 were ordered against us.
That is the position today, before this Bill enlarges the office. There is no internal watchdog either: a complaint about how something was handled returns to the same chain that handled it. And the Bioethics Advisory Committee describes itself as “a policy advisory body, not an executive body”; it hears no appeals. Three doors, all shut.
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