Breaking apart Minister K Shanmugam’s ‘countless’ defamation suits claim

by Ganga Sudhan

In the ongoing tussle between Lee Hsien Yang, the brother of the Prime Minister, and Minister K Shanmugam regarding the content of a Facebook post, the Minister posted on Facebook to justify the decision to pursue the defamation suit in the Singapore courts even though Lee Hsien Yang is based in the United Kingdom and made the post while being situated there.

In that post, he made the assertion that “countless Singaporeans have sued in the Singapore Courts for defamation that is published to people in Singapore”.

It is somewhat oxymoronic to refer to the context as “countless” while also indicating that the information is published to the public.

Looking at the data published on the Singapore Courts website (https://www.judiciary.gov.sg/) regarding the cases heard, there appear to be 304 cases which involved defamation between March 2000 and August 2023 (which is the time period available to search through the portal).

Considering that the total number of cases for that period is 9,157 according to the overall search results, that translates to 3.3% of the cases heard over the past 2 decades being defamation suits – which is hardly countless.

Table 1: Defamation suits involving recognisable entities in the Singapore political climate

Looking at the proportion of the 304 defamation-centred suits over this period, at least 32 appear to be related to individuals concerned with Singapore politics – which is more than 10% of defamation suits over the past 23 years.

A breakdown of the cases involving defamation are shown in Table 1 (including those involving others suing or being sued by the Attorney General and the Public Prosecutor).

Table 2, meanwhile, distils the number of defamation suits according to political actors in Singapore and suggests that those with affiliation to the PAP account for 18 of the 32 defamation suits initiated and 12 defamation suits were initiated by others not associated with the PAP.

Table 2: List of defamation suits initiated by political entities

The numbers published, therefore do not look “countless” or substantial in terms of Singaporeans who choose to sue for defamation in the Singapore Courts.

Instead, it suggests that the Prime Minister has a remarkable number of defamation suits initiated (11 out of 48), accounting for 3.6% of all defamation suits since 2000.

As the analysis here is superficial in nature, it would be well-served for Minister Shanmugam to produce more detailed figures to correct any errors noted so that Singaporeans do not assume this analysis to be a true reflection of the rate of defamation suits initiated in Singapore in recent times.

Gutzy has written to K Shanmugam seeking clarification on his use of the term “countless,” especially in light of available statistics.