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Parliament agrees to amend Constitution to disqualify MPs fined at least S$10,000, up from S$2,000

SINGAPORE — Parliament on Monday (May 9) passed amendments to the Constitution which will raise the threshold for Members of Parliament (MP) to be disqualified after receiving unanimous support across the House. 

Parliament agrees to amend Constitution to disqualify MPs fined at least S$10,000, up from S$2,000
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  • Parliament passed amendments to the Constitution that would disqualify a Member of Parliament (MP) if he is fined a minimum of S$10,000
  • The current threshold of S$2,000 had not been revised since Singapore's independence
  • Some MPs had earlier suggested specifying the types of offence rather than using blanket criteria based on court sentences

SINGAPORE — Parliament on Monday (May 9) passed amendments to the Constitution which will raise the threshold for Members of Parliament (MP) to be disqualified after receiving unanimous support across the House. 

If the Constitution of the Republic of Singapore (Amendment) Bill is agreed to by the President, an MP will be disqualified from his position if he is fined at least S$10,000, up from the current S$2,000, among other tweaks to the legislation.

This will be the first time the fine quantum has been revised since Singapore’s independence and was tabled as part of the Elections Department’s (ELD) review of the country’s electoral processes and legislation.

Rounding up a short debate on Monday that involved three MPs rising to speak, Minister-in-charge of the Public Service Chan Chun Sing said that the spirit behind the law remains the same despite the changes.

If we set the bar too high, then we may inadvertently rule out many people who might want to participate in the democratic process, the representative democratic process that we have.
Minister-in-charge of the Public Service Chan Chun Sing

“If we set the bar too high, then we may inadvertently rule out many people who might want to participate in the democratic process, the representative democratic process that we have,” said Mr Chan, who is also Education Minister.

But if the bar is set too low, then it would seem incongruent with what Singapore expects of its public officers and uniformed officers, he added.

The amendments were passed with all 88 MPs present on Monday voting for the Bill, with no abstentions and objections. Nominated MPs are not entitled to vote on constitutional amendments. An amendment must be passed by at least two-thirds of MPs.

Mr Chan said that the disqualifying criterion is just one of the several gauges of whether a person is fit to be an MP.

Political parties must continue to ensure that their MPs and election candidates are people with integrity and adhere to the highest standards of conduct.

The MPs themselves and, most importantly, the public must also hold MPs and candidates to that standard, he said.

“The strongest safeguard against any degradation of the standards of this House must be our electorate who ultimately elect our people into this House,” he said. 

The Bill was introduced in Parliament about two months after a parliamentary committee investigating former Workers’ Party (WP) MP Raeesah Khan, who had lied in the House about a sexual assault case, delivered its final report to Parliament.

The report proposed that Ms Raeesah be fined S$35,000 and that WP chief Pritam Singh and party vice-chairman Faisal Manap be referred to the Public Prosecutor to consider criminal proceedings for their conduct before the committee.

Parliament approved the proposals soon after and the police said two weeks ago that the Attorney-General has referred Mr Singh and Mr Faisal’s case to the police for investigations.

In a statement accompanying the introducing of the amendment Bill on Feb 4, ELD said that the changes were to ensure that the fine quantum for disqualification of an MP accounts for inflation and corresponds to the sentences handed down for offences "relevant to the integrity of the person" in Singapore, such as tax evasion and corruption.

It added that amendments will ensure that MPs, as well as members of the Council of Presidential Advisers and the Presidential Council for Minority Rights who share the same disqualifying criteria, are "persons with integrity and who adhere to high standards of conduct".

MPS SUGGEST SPECIFYING OFFENCE TYPES

On Monday before the Bill was passed, Mr Lim Biow Chuan, MP for Mountbatten Single Member Constituency (SMC), and Mr Murali Pillai, MP for Bukit Batok SMC, both suggested identifying the specific types of offences that would disqualify an MP.

Mr Lim proposed that the Constitution specifies that a person would be disqualified from being an MP if he is convicted of any offence that relates to dishonesty, fraud, corruption or bribery, but not for careless driving, for instance.

The Government should also review whether statutory offences or ones that are technical in nature should result in disqualification.

Mr Lim suggested taking this example: A company director could not get a fellow shareholder to hold an annual general meeting and thus fails to make a required annual filing to the authorities. If the court fines the director more than the threshold to be an MP, should he be disqualified? 

He noted as well that the law already sets out the types of offences that would mean a person, if convicted of one of them, would be barred from serving as a director in a charity or of a company. 

“I would urge the Government to do likewise — signal the type of dishonest conduct that we wish to guard against, not just by adjusting the quantum of the fine,” Mr Lim said.

Mr Murali noted that even under the amendment, an MP would not be automatically disqualified if he is sentenced to less than one year’s jail. Another criterion for disqualification in the Constitution is an MP being sentenced to not less than one year's jail, and it has not been amended.

He noted recent court cases where an offender convicted of possessing obscene videos including child sexual abuse material, another convicted of molesting a female teenager and a third who was convicted of forgery for the purposes of cheating involving S$9.7 million.

These three offenders had all received jail terms of less than a year and would not be automatically disqualified if they were sitting MPs, he said.

In response, Mr Chan said that the scope of the five-page Bill was left intentionally narrow and focused mainly on updating the disqualification criteria.

“This is in keeping with the democratic ideal that the rights of individuals to participate in the political process and to stand for public office should be unfettered as far as possible,” he said. 

“While we need to ensure the fitness of individuals to be parliamentarians, the bar cannot be so high that we undermine our parliamentary system which is founded on representative democracy.” 

Keeping the disqualification criteria to a “reasonable threshold”, Mr Chan said, also allows voters broad discretion to choose whom they wish to represent them.

He noted that many other jurisdictions disqualify elected members if they have been sentenced to jail terms of one or two years, not by the type of offences.

This is because of the inherent challenges in listing the specific offences and then having to frequently amend the Constitution to update the offence list, he said.

Meanwhile, WP MP Sylvia Lim suggested that future reviews of the Constitution examine whether it is appropriate to remove fines altogether or look to future refinements.

She referred to the case of opposition politician John Tan, who was fined S$5,000 for contempt of court in 2019, though she did not identify Tan by name. 

This put the vice-chairman of the Singapore Democratic Party over the S$2,000 disqualifying threshold to stand for election.

Ms Lim noted that when Tan applied to the High Court to be eligible to contest the General Election, the judge ruled that even matters considered “quasi-criminal”, such as contempt of court, would suffice for disqualification.

Nevertheless, she said that the WP supports the Bill to raise the threshold of fines for disqualification.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article stated that Non-Constituency Members of Parliament (NCMPs) are not entitled to vote on constitutional amendments. This is incorrect. The NCMP scheme had been amended to give them the same voting rights as MPs. We are sorry for the error.

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