KRYSTLE CHIANG
Second Year NUS Law, Associate Editor, SLR

It’s old news now – Mr. Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam has passed on.

The first time I saw him was just this year, in the bar room of the Subordinate Courts. He was completely alone, yet confidently at ease, taking leisurely sips from his coffee mug while perusing the day’s news. I remember being envious of his ability to be disaffected by the socialising going on around him, while I was discomfited by the very same surroundings. An intern then, I felt like a fish out of water; but he was comfortably at home, being who he was, where he was. His easy manner hinted at his vast experience in the law, which included holding the position of First Criminal District Judge back in 1963, a fact often eclipsed by his political reputation.

Indeed, with the spotlight focused mainly on his political undertakings since his passing, little has been mentioned about his legal contributions. Yet, Mr. Jeyaretnam was a man whose life was tied inextricably to the law; whose passions were devoted to upholding and influencing the law both directly and indirectly. Throughout his lifetime, he was a lawyer, a judge, the occasional defendant, as well as a member of the legislature. His was an enriching legal journey and he had intimate dealings with every aspect of the law, from cross examining witnesses in court to engaging in fiery debates in parliament.

His most remarkable imprint on the law in Singapore lay in the law of defamation. The case of Jeyaretnam Joshua Benjamin v. Lee Kuan Yew, [1992] 2 Sing. L.R. 310 defined the scope of qualified privilege, a defence to defamation. When asked to consider if this common law defence should extend to cover words spoken at an election rally, the Court of Appeal held that it should not, gleaning from s. 14 of the Defamation Act (Cap 75) the intention of parliament to restrict “the scope of privilege to be attached to a speech made at an election”.  Six years after the case concluded, Mr. Jeyaretnam, who was dissatisfied with the state of the law on defamation,, sought to move a motion on 26^th November 1998 to have a commission appointed to examine and recommend changes to defamation laws in Singapore. He believed that it was the right of “every citizen to ask honestly, without any malice, any questions of public officials in their conduct and discharge of public functions” (Sing, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 69, col. 1728 (26 November 1998).

Mr. Jeyaretnam in part, if not mostly, also played the role of the catalyst in the decision to abolish appeals to the Privy Council in cases concerning disciplinary proceedings against lawyers in 1989. After the Privy Council decided in 1988 that he should be reinstated to the bar because of the “grave injustice” done him, this channel of recourse was eradicated by the government. In Parliament, Professor S Jayakumar, the then Minister for Law, reasoned that allowing such appeals opened “a loophole for lawyers who [had] been convicted of criminal proceedings in the courts and [faced] disciplinary proceedings instituted by the Law Society (Sing, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 52, col. 742-743 (17 February 1989).

Shortly before his demise, he had actually helped file a class action lawsuit against Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong for not holding a by-election in Jurong Group Representative Constituency following the death of its MP. In fact, he was set to appear before the High Court on October 15 this year, the first time in a long while that he would have donned the robes of a lawyer.

Whether he was using his brush to paint his vision of the law, or getting into a brush with the law, Mr. Jeyaretnam had always shown great fortitude and fighting spirit. His passing is a loss to many. The brief glimpse I got of Mr. Jeyaretnam might be dismissed by some as a mundane sighting, but he made his presence felt then, despite the triviality of what he was doing. I cannot help but remember Mr. Jeyaretnam.

He will be missed.