“The reason we brought this suit is that it’s an attempt by Singapore to encroach upon, stifle or crack down on freedom of speech in Malaysia. It is an attempt to reach out their tentacles and impose their own oppressive fake news act on Malaysians issuing statements in Malaysia,” said Lawyers for Liberty adviser N. Surendran, an anti-death penalty activist and former member of parliament who is named as one of the plaintiffs in the suit, alongside Lawyers for Liberty director Melissa Sasidaran and the organisation itself.

The group is represented by top human rights lawyers Ambiga Sreenevasan and Gurdial Singh Nijar.

“If they extend this law extraterritorially they are applying their laws to citizens of this country to prevent them from exercising fundamental rights given under our Constitution,” said Gurdial, adding that the courts had to decide if public policy would override Singapore’s claim to sovereignty in this instance.

Gurdial encouraged Shanmugam to waive his claim to state immunity on the basis of rule of law, and have the matter adjudicated “not in Singaporean courts but in a neutral area like Malaysia, where our citizens are directly affected.”

The South China Morning Post has reached out to Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs for comment.

It said officers were “told to kick the back of the neck” of prisoners whenever the rope broke because that would be “consistent with death by hanging”.

“The officers are told not to kick more than two times, so that there will be no telltale marks in case there is an autopsy,” said the Lawyers for Liberty statement.

Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs refuted the claims, saying they were “untrue, baseless and preposterous”.

Singapore uses fake news law on watchdog that criticised executions

However, Lawyers for Liberty have maintained that their allegations stem from credible sources – specifically, prison guards that have worked for or are currently working for the prison system in Singapore – and has refused to comply with the correction order, resulting in Singaporean authorities asking internet service providers to block the Lawyers for Liberty website.

This move showed that Singapore’s government was “more interested in silencing us rather than getting to the truth of what’s happening”, said Surendran.

“We have written to them and offered to give them our evidence. They did not respond to our attempts. Our sources have said they are willing to testify if they are treated as whistle-blowers, but the fact we have been threatened with Pofma shows that our decision to keep our sources secret was the correct one,” he said at the Kuala Lumpur Court Complex on Friday. He added that another guard employed by Changi Prison had come forward since Lawyers for Liberty had gone public.

Shanmugam has vociferously defended Pofma despite local and international criticism, giving assurances that free speech proponents have little to worry about as Pofma only targets “falsehoods”, “bots”, “trolls” and “fake accounts”.

Singapore’s fake news law: protecting the truth, or restricting free debate?

Although Malaysia previously had its own fake news law, this was repealed by the government after elections in 2018 that saw the Pakatan Harapan coalition wrest power from Barisan Nasional, meaning that Pofma has no parallel in Malaysian criminal law.

Despite an Amnesty International report finding that most countries are abandoning capital punishment, Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand were found to be going in the opposite direction. In 2018, Singapore hanged 13 people – its most since 2003. It maintains that the death penalty is an important component of its comprehensive anti-drug strategy.

Malaysia has moved towards abolishing the death penalty, placing a moratorium on the punishment

as part of Pakatan Harapan’s progressive legal reform agenda.