Around four
days ago, the legal fraternity in Singapore got a nasty shock when the news broke
that there were six law students were caught for cheating in their bar exams.
This new has been a shock for Singapore.
We are proudly “non-corrupt”
(we are officially the fourth least corrupt nation on the planet – the only Asian
nation in the top five, ranking with New Zealand and the Nordics) and we revel
in the reputation of being the best exam takers in the world. Why would any of
our kids’ “cheat” when they had everything at their disposal to ensure they passed
fair and square?
This incident
has put the powers that be in a peculiar position. The government, which
normally has a lot to say about incidents of “cheating” has been silent and
left most of the talking to the judiciary. The Attorney-General’s chamber has recommended
that five of the candidates have their admission to the bar delayed whilst one
of them be delayed for a year. The Law Society has said that it would object
their admission. The judge at the centre of the case, Mr. Choo Han Teck has stated
that “something has gone wrong,” but at the same time has kept the names of the
young offenders out of the public eye so as not to “prejudice” their futures.
More of the story can be found at:
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/law-society-lawsoc-trainee-lawyers-cheat-bar-exam-2635466
This incident and
the way that it’s been handled does raise several questions about one of the key
points about Singapore’s entire system – namely the question of integrity and
rule of law.
As mentioned
earlier, Singapore is famously “anti-corruption,” and in fairness, the example
was set by the top. Lee Kuan Yew, our first Prime Minister, held his ministers
to such a high standard of integrity that suicide was actually the better option
than being exposed to a hint of scandal and in way, you could say this has been
institutionalised. My former Battery Commander, once told me that when he took
the post of “Chief Supply Officer” of the Army, the anti-corruption people told
him that they would be keeping an eye on him because he was in a “corruption prone”
office.”
Our methods of
keeping people on the straight and narrow also involves carrots as well as
sticks. The best example is seen by our Ministerial Salaries, which are the
world’s best. Whilst everyone knows about our ministerial salaries, the
salaries of officials down the food chain are not to be sniffed at too.
So, how did six
young people from “good” families get involved in a “cheating” scandal particularly
for a profession that places ethnical practice as one of its main requirements?
How is it such that the proposed sanctions sound more like a “slap on the wrist”
or a “go stand in a corner” rather than a punitive sanction?
Well, let’s start
with the definition of what counts as corruption. The corruption that Singapore
fights so hard against, is inevitably the money variety. Public officials for
example, are paid well, so that they don’t need to shake people down for
bribes. People who get government contracts are actually supposed to deliver something
of a reasonable quality rather than pocket the money and leave the nation with
unusable infrastructure.
Tackling money
corruption has made Singapore a shinning beacon. As a prominent Emirati
businesswoman once said to me – “Singapore washes the face of the Oriental.”
However, as
Professor Mushtaq Khan from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS –
which as a matter of full disclosure was my first-choice university) argues,
there are different forms of corruption. In an interview with “Hard Copy” of
Nigeria, Professor Khan points out that in some states, corruption doe not need
to involve money and provided the example of how a state can take your property
by merely passing laws to do so without demanding a bribe. The state has the power
to make what is illegal – legal. More on Professor Khan’s interview can be seen
at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H1SSyIxLLY
Professor Khan,
who is British-Bangladeshi, argued that in the UK for example, people followed
the laws and stayed on the narrow because what they were afraid of was being
shunned by their peers rather than the state. By contrast, in less developed economies,
the elite used “informal” ways of enforcing contracts and nobody really told on
anyone because everyone had “dirty laundry.”
In way this bar
exam cheating scandal does put this under the spotlight. It’s not corruption in
the sense that no money has changed hands and that the young people in question
are not joining the civil service.
However, one
has to ask several questions. Why, for example, did they feel that they could
get away with cheating in an exam? Is there a culture of cheating in our
judiciary? Then, there is the fact that whilst the Judge had stated that
cheating in a professional public exam, dishonesty and lack of propriety were
not the only vices on display, the sanction against the six was sought not as a
punishment but as a form of reflection.
Sure, I get
that we should allow young people a chance to redeem themselves. The crime in question
is not like that of Brock Turner, who raped a woman in 2015 and was let off
because the judge didn’t want to ruin his future. I also get the fact that the
young people in question are not peddling drugs, which can be harmful to those
they sell to.
However, why do
we feel the need to protect them by keeping their names out of the public
domain? We’ve argued that we need to hang drug couriers because regardless of
the circumstances (whether they are medically slow or not) because they damage
the fabric of society. We have no problem giving each drug courier a name and
when activist like M. Ravi or Kristin Han try to humanise them, they get labelled
as being less than patriotic or in Mr. Ravi’s case less than sane.
Well, these
young people have damaged the integrity of the judiciary and for that, they need
to be punished so that no one else gets the idea that they can cheat their way onto
the bar. Nobody is calling for them to be jailed or hanged but at the very
least, their acts need to known to the wider world. We need to create a system
where people who cheat get shunned by their peers rather than waiting for the
state and the judiciary to slap them on the wrist.
We need to be serious
about maintaining our judicial integrity. We should understand that that the children
of middle-class families, who are more often than not of lighter complexion,
can do damage to the fabric of our society and we need to have the same zeal in
holding them to account the same way we are so eager to hold the children of
poorer people, who are more often than not from ethnicities of a dark complexion,
to account for their actions.
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