The Consul-General of Singapore, Chan Heng Wing in his letter to these columns on March 7, is factually incorrect when he says that 'the US Supreme Court recently ruled against an anti-abortion Web site that listed the names of doctors who performed abortions and crossed the names out one by one as the doctors were murdered'.
It was not the US Supreme Court, but a federal jury in Portland, Oregon, that decided on February 2 that the 'Nuremberg Files' Web site, created by militant abortion opponents, carried material that amounted to death threats to abortion doctors.
The jury ordered the anti-abortion activists to pay US$107 million in damages to Planned Parenthood and a group of doctors.
The defendants, who said the jury's decision trampled on their constitutional right of free speech, have vowed to appeal.
The case may well end up in the US Supreme Court as a major test of the line between protected speech and unlawful intimidation.
K. Y. TSUI Kowloon Tong
