Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

We are being asked to ratify the partnership and co-operation agreement with Singapore today. Only 15 days ago, Singapore passed the Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act. It is legislation which allows the authorities to force social media platforms and Internet service providers to hand over user data, to block contacts and remove applications that share information considered by the authorities to be anti-state. Ms Emerlynne Gil, Amnesty International's deputy regional director for research, said:

The passing of Singapore’s foreign interference law constitutes a brutal attack on the rights to freedom of expression and association, creating yet another tool that can be used arbitrarily by the authorities to stifle government critics and crush dissent in the country.

It is a brutal attack on the rights of freedom of expression and association and the Government wants us to send a signal, 15 days later, that it is no problem and we are happy to ratify a partnership and co-operation, PCA, agreement with Singapore.

Last week, Mr. Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Asia division, commented that, "It’s hard to believe that the Singapore government could make the laws against fundamental freedoms even worse than they already are, but the Foreign Interference Act manages to do that". He went on to say that, "Failure to withdraw the law would reinforce Singapore’s international reputation as a human rights disaster, both online and off."

One would presume so, but then the actions of the Irish Government and the EU in pushing ahead with this PCA agreement with Singapore suggests that trade and profit are being put ahead of solidarity and human rights by them. In Singapore, capital punishment is mandatory for certain drug offences and is in effect for a wide range of other crimes.

The use of corporal punishment, including caning, continues to be a standard practice within the Singapore criminal justice system and in many instances is mandatory. Singapore also continues to criminalise consensual sexual relations between men, under criminal code section 377A. Associations of more than ten people are required to register with the government and the registrar of societies has broad authority to deny registration if he determines the group could be "prejudicial to the public peace, welfare or good order". The Societies Act makes explicit reference to gender, sexual orientation and human rights as grounds for denying the registration of a group. The registrar has refused to allow any LGBTQ organisation to register as a society on the grounds "it is contrary to the public interest to grant legitimacy to the promotion of homosexual activities and viewpoints". On the one hand, rightly, one has the European Commission criticising the Polish Government for doing precisely that by seeking to outlaw LGBT in whole areas of Poland but proceeding to ratify a PCA with a country which proceeds and continues to do this on the other.

The state-owned media development authority effectively prohibits all positive depictions of LGBTQ lives on television or radio. In June 2017, the advertising standards agency asked a shopping centre to remove the phrase "supporting the freedom to love" from a promotional ad for a 2017 Pink Dot festival on the grounds it "may affect public sensitivities". We are being asked to ratify a partnership and co-operation agreement with a government and state with this track record, which is not only appalling but which is getting worse by the week. In effect, this will be an encouragement to continue along these tracks.

It is also worth mentioning the PCA comes together with the EU-Singapore investment protection agreement. The latter includes notorious investment court system provisions and as with the CETA, and the attempted Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, TTIP, before it, these provisions will establish a permanent, institutionalised, alternative legal system; a parallel justice system set up exclusively for corporations, enabling them to sue the State, not in the Irish courts but in special parallel courts, basically for anything that interferes with their right to profit which can be determined as indirect expropriation. The Tánaiste recently admitted to me in committee that if we ratified CETA, the Canadian company which owns IRES REIT could sue the State in a special investor court, were we to introduce further rent controls. The EU-Singapore investment protection agreement would mean the same would apply to any Singapore company or one able to say it has a headquarters or base in Singapore. For all those reasons, we should not be ratifying this agreement.

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