Singapore is set to charge a civil rights campaigner with staging a one-man protest without a permit over an incident in which he held up a sign bearing a crudely drawn smiley face outside a police station.
Police on Thursday told Jolovan Wham, 40, that he would be formally charged in court on Monday.
Wham has previously had several run-ins with the authorities in the city-state, which tightly controls public assembly, the media and free speech.
Photo: Jolovan Wham via Reuters
The charge relates to a March incident in which Wham demonstrated his support for a young environmentalist, who said that he had been questioned by police over a similar protest days previous.
Wham posted a picture of himself holding the sign on his social media accounts.
Wham, who has already served two brief stints in jail this year, is to be charged under the Public Order Act, which regulates assemblies and processions in public places, according to a charge sheet Wham posted on Twitter.
He faces a fine of up to S$5,000 (US$3,720).
“These charges against me only show how absurd the situation has become,” Wham wrote in a text message, adding that he planned to plead not guilty.
“Calling what I did an assembly is an abuse of the English language. How can one man standing in public for a few seconds for a photo op be a threat to public order?” he wrote.
Amnesty International Southeast Asia researcher Rachel Chhoa-Howard said that the incident was “yet another example of targeted action” to clamp down on Wham’s “peaceful activism.”
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RUSSIAN INPUT: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov called Washington’s actions in Asia ‘destructive,’ accusing it of being the reason for the ‘militarization’ of Japan The US is concerned about China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful” activities in the disputed South China Sea, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ASEAN leaders yesterday during an annual summit, and pledged that Washington would continue to uphold freedom of navigation in the region. The 10-member ASEAN meeting with Blinken followed a series of confrontations at sea between China and ASEAN members Philippines and Vietnam. “We are very concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful activities in the South China Sea which have injured people, harm vessels from ASEAN nations and contradict commitments to peaceful resolutions of disputes,” said Blinken, who
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS