Schedium

On July 18, 2010, British author Alan Shadrake was arrested in Singapore , two days after the country's attorney general had submitted an affidavit recommending his prosecution on charges of "scandaliz[ing] the Singapore Judiciary." The 75-yeard-old Shadrake had arrived in Singapore to promote his book ' Once a Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice in the Dock ’, which uncovered alleged bias in the implementation of the madantatory death penalty for drug trafficking by the judicial system. Police detained him after a complaint was lodged by Singapore's Media Development Authority. On November 3, 2010, Alan Shadrake was convicted for "scandalizing the judiciary." Singapore’s attorney-general argued that "public confidence in the Singapore Judiciary cannot be allowed, in any way, to be tarnished or diminished by any contumacious behaviour." The defendant claimed that his book amounted to "fair criticism on matters of compelling public inte...

To Singapore with Love , a documentary film by Singaporean director Tan Pin Pin, has been banned in Singapore due to national security concerns. The film revolves around the lives of activists, student leaders and members of the communist party who fled the country between the 1960's and the 1980's in the midst of crackdowns carried out by the British colonial government and then the government of the new Republic.  The Media Development Authority (MDA) , a government agency that supervises Singapore's media, decided that the film is "not allowed for all ratings", which means that it cannot be distributed or publicly screened in Singapore.  

Singapore skyline (by Merlion444 [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons ) Singapore is a success story. As founding father Lee Kuan Yew said in his  autobiography , Singapore moved from being a third world country in the 1960s, to being one of the richest countries on earth by the end of the 1990s. Singapore is a city-state which in the middle of the 1990s was half the size of Hong Kong, with a population of 3.04 million ( Kwong / Chau et al. 2001 , p. 1). A former British colony, Singapore's political situation after WWII was tumultuous. The city was granted independence from the British Empire in 1958. Singapore's leaders, however, did not want to found a separate state, but to become part of neighbouring Malaysia. In the 1959 elections, the People's Action Party (PAP), which still rules Singapore today, "promised clean, efficient politics and pledged to address issues in education, labor, housing, health, social security, economic growth through industrializati...