Hong Kong protests show Singapore’s ‘zero tolerance’ for illegal demonstrations is right move: minister K Shanmugam

The home minister said the ‘actions of a disaffected few should not be allowed to threaten the rights of the majority’

He also said strict policing and laws would not keep people off the streets if they believed the ‘system is fundamentally unfair’

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Singapore's Minister of Law Kasiviswanathan Shanmugam. Photo: AFP

Published: 5:06pm, 2 Mar 2020Updated: 6:13pm, 2 Mar 2020

Singapore’s “zero tolerance” for protests without a police permit is the right move, the country’s home affairs minister said on Monday, as he pointed to how Hong Kong’s months of unrest last year showed even a top-class police force could not handle public disorder on a mass scale.

K Shanmugam, who is also the law minister, said members of Hong Kong’s police force faced international and domestic public criticism even as they fended off protesters who were using increasingly violent and disruptive tactics. The lesson for Singapore, he said in Parliament, was that “there has to be a zero tolerance approach to illegal demonstrations and protests”.

“The actions of a disaffected few should not be allowed to threaten the rights of the majority to live in a stable, peaceful society,” Shanmugan said, citing other similar protests that have erupted around the world in the past year, including those in Chile and Lebanon.

Riot police detain an anti-government protester during a protest at Mong Kok in Hong Kong on March 1. Photo: Reuters

Shanmugam made the comments during a committee of supply debate that followed the announcement of an increased budget allocation for the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to S$6.17 billion (US$4.44 billion).

The operating expenditure for MHA increased by about S$439 million (US$315 million), or 7.7 per cent, to enhance the ministry’s ability to deal with heightened security threats, with the police force taking up the largest share of the pie, at 53 per cent.