Parliament votes Tuesday — five minutes could put a question on the record

Dear Supporters, 

You signed this petition because you thought it mattered whether the people holding public office also hold other roles, and whether Parliament should settle that quietly. There is a Bill before Parliament on Tuesday that raises the same question, and almost nobody has heard of it.

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.

Here is the part that belongs to this petition. The Chief Executive will decide who may possess dangerous pathogens and which laboratories are certified to hold them. Senior regulators here commonly hold academic appointments at the institutions they regulate — unavoidable in a country this size, and often useful. So the question is not anyone’s integrity. It is this: what in this Bill requires an interest to be declared, a decision to be recorded, or a recusal to take place? There is no declaration requirement, no recusal provision, no register, and no independent review of the decision afterwards. Where overlap is unavoidable, the safeguard cannot be the separation of people. It has to be the separation of process.

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