Keynote Address by Minister for Law and Second Minister for Home Affairs Edwin Tong SC at the 2026 Commonwealth Association of Legislative Counsel Conference

15 July 2026 Posted in Speeches

Justice Dr. Johnson Okello, President of the Commonwealth Association of Legislative Counsel (CALC)

Mr Lucien Wong SC, Attorney-General of Singapore

All CALC members

Distinguished guests

Ladies and gentlemen

Introduction

1. Very good morning to all of you.

2. It is a real pleasure, to add to my colleague’s welcome earlier, to welcome all of you to Singapore, those of you who have travelled from far away.

3. Dr. Johnson said that there are about 204 participants this morning, and I am told that you come from about 40 countries.

4. We are really honoured and privileged to be able to host you here this morning.

5. You heard earlier that before I took up this role, in the last term of government, I was the Minister for Culture, Community and Youth. So, before I start, I thought I will lend my recommendations to all of you to take part in some culture of Singapore, to imbibe the culture – not just the food that Lucien spoke about, but also to look around. You are in the middle of the Civic District, but not far from you is where Chinatown is. There is also Little India, and very much a heritage part of Singapore around Bussorah Street, you will see the wonderful Golden Mosque, and really just within 20 minutes of where you are now, you will see the best of Singapore culture.

6. Of course, can’t forget the food as well. If you have not had a chance to, yes, the durians are fantastic. Andy (Beattie, Immediate Past President of CALC) said he had a great evening last evening trying it out, but there is a lot more to experience and sample. Food, as you might know, is really a part of our culture. Before we get onto anything else, the first topic of discussion for most Singaporeans is often what you had for dinner last evening and what you will be having for dinner this evening.

7. So, I hope that beyond the rich discussions that you will have over the next three days, you will also make some time to experience all that our city has to offer – our sights, our culture, and of course, our food.

Importance of CALC Conference

8. Back to this morning’s topic. This conference brings together a profession that – as you heard from both speakers earlier – lies at the heart of good government and the rule of law.

9. Much attention is often given to those who formulate policy, interpret the law or argue it in court – or in Dr. Johnson Okello’s case, listen to those arguments and interpret them in court. But less attention is paid to those who draft it.

10. I’m sure you will all agree with me, every law follows a journey. It begins as a policy idea, it is debated and refined, and it is ultimately enacted in Parliament.

11. But between policy and law lies a critical step – and that is the work of the legislative counsel. It is all of you who transform policy intent meaningfully into legislation that is clear, precise and workable.

12. That very special skill, calls not only for legal expertise and technical knowledge, but one that is also grounded in sound judgment, experience, intuition, foresight, and a deep understanding of the society that the law is intended to serve.

13. This morning, I would like to share Singapore’s legislative history – we are a young country, 61 years old this year. I would like to share with you how our laws have evolved, how they have responded to the changing needs of our society, and in the course of that, outline the indispensable role that legislative counsel has played in this process.

14. I hope that some of what I share will resonate with your own experiences, even if the specifics might differ.

Singapore's Legislative Journey

15. This year marks an important milestone for the Singapore legal system. You heard earlier that we are commemorating the bicentennial anniversary of the Second Charter of Justice, issued in 1826, which introduced English law and the common law tradition to Singapore.

16. These foundations have of course served us well for the last two centuries: the rule of law – anchored into everything that we do in Singapore, an independent judiciary, and the principle that no one, absolutely no one, is above the law.

17. In our early years, many of our laws were adopted from England with relatively few, if any, modifications. As a colony, we drew on a mature legal system that had developed coherent principles and institutions over centuries, and we simply adopted them and applied them in Singapore.

18. But with independence in 1965, it brought about a very different challenge. At that time, if you go back 61 years, we were a very young nation, freshly independent, possibly against the will of the government at that point in time, with no natural resources, no shared history as an independent State, and a diverse society that is made up of Chinese, Malay, Indian and other ethnic communities, each with its own language, culture and religious traditions.

19. So, our task at that point in time was not simply to build an economy. It was to build a nation from scratch.

20. On the day of independence, 9 August 1965, our founding Prime Minister Mr Lee Kuan Yew expressed that aspiration in words that, till today, still resonate with us and guide us in much of the policy making that we do and the laws that we pass. He said, “This is not a Malay nation; this is not a Chinese nation; this is not an Indian nation. Everybody will have his place: equal; language, culture, religion.”

21. Those were not merely words. They became words that had to be reflected in our Constitution, embedded in our legislation, and reinforced consistently through our institutions.

22. Independence brought not just political change, but a fundamental shift in the nature of legislative work. We could no longer simply transplant laws from England and assume they would take root here and apply in the same way. We had to develop legislation that was genuinely our own – grounded in our history, shaped by our values and experiences, and perhaps most importantly, responsive to our own unique circumstances and contextual nuances.

23. The clearest expression of that shift came in 1994, when Singapore abolished appeals to the Privy Council, and made our own Court of Appeal, our final appellate court. Until then, the appeals in Singapore could go to the Privy Council in England.

24. What emerged over time is what legal scholars would call an autochthonous legal system – rooted in the common law tradition, but really grown from our own soil and shaped, bit by bit, by our own experiences.

25. That process of evolution has not stopped. At every stage, our legislative counsel have played a vital role – translating Singapore’s ambitions into legislation that is coherent, workable and enduring.

26. I thought this morning to share that process or that journey with you through the lens of three examples, each of them illustrating a different dimension of what good drafting requires – an appreciation of local context and history that was particularly important for Singapore in our formative years; the ability to balance competing interests in a highly polycentric environment, taking into account a whole multifaceted spectrum of different considerations; and the capacity to respond to new and rapidly evolving challenges.

Example 1: Racial and Religious Harmony

27. When Singapore was independent, back to what I said earlier, our diversity was both our defining characteristic but also our most delicate challenge.

28. In the years leading up to independence – in the 1950s and 1960s, Singapore and the region in which Singapore was sited in - Southeast Asia - experienced racial riots that claimed lives, fractured communities, and left deep scars on our society.

29. Those events shaped our national psyche. They taught us that racial and religious harmony cannot be taken for granted. It must be consciously built, carefully protected and continually renewed.

30. That lesson remains as relevant today as it was 60 years ago. Around the world, we continue to see how quickly racial and religious tensions can erupt – from the Christchurch mosque attacks in 2019, to the racially motivated shootings in Buffalo in 2022, to riots in parts of the United Kingdom following the Southport attack in 2024.

31. I think the lesson to be learned is that no society is immune, and I suspect that many of you in this room, as drafting counsel, grapple with the same question as we do, of how the law can help hold a diverse society together.

32. On our part, Singapore has never assumed that harmony would endure on its own. We have taken the view that harmony has to be constructed. We have got to reinforce it continually, through policy, through laws, and through systems and institutions in Singapore.

33. Today, Singapore is ranked the world’s most religiously diverse society by the Religious Diversity Report 2026, yet it is also consistently regarded as one of its most harmonious. The latest surveys including the 2024 IPS–OnePeople.sg survey bears this out, finding strong levels of trust across racial and religious communities, with the overwhelming majority of Singaporeans expressing confidence that people of different races and religions can live harmoniously together. This is the result of deliberate choices made over many decades.

34. Those choices began with our Constitution. The first version of the Constitution which was drafted guarantees equality before the law, and safeguards the freedom to profess, practise and propagate one’s religion. In fact, the Constitution embeds the obligation of every government of the day in Singapore to ensure that the minority in race and in religion are well looked after in Singapore.

35. One distinctive feature of our constitutional framework is the Presidential Council for Minority Rights (PCMR). In many jurisdictions, once a Bill is passed in Parliament, it proceeds directly for assent and therefore adoption, and after gazetting, it becomes law in that country. In Singapore, most Bills before that process is embarked on are also scrutinised by the PCMR. The PCMR considers whether any provision in the new Bill differentiates unfairly against a racial or religious community. So, every Bill goes through that process before it is passed as law and assented to. This additional safeguard reflects how seriously we take equality and minority protection in our own legislative process.

36. Beyond the Constitution, Parliament has enacted legislation to preserve harmony and strengthen our social compact. Two pieces of legislation that stand out in this field:

a. The Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act enables early intervention when actions threaten to undermine religious harmony. Rather than waiting for tensions to boil over into open conflict, the Act empowers the Government to act, to do something, before harm occurs – whether by restricting the activities of religious leaders who incite ill will, or by addressing conduct that wound the sensitivities of other communities. The Act reflects a deeply held belief that preserving trust between communities is far preferable to repairing it after conflict has occurred.

b. More recently, the Maintenance of Racial Harmony Act strengthens our framework for safeguarding racial harmony and addressing newer challenges. Indeed, as you heard earlier, the world has changed. Foreign actors can now exploit racial fault lines from thousands of miles away with a click of the button on the Internet. Social media can amplify a single inflammatory post into a national controversy within hours, and sometimes that controversy spills over into violence, claiming lives, damaging property, and most importantly, undermining the social fabric and trust that exists within each community. The Act therefore extends our framework to address foreign interference in racial matters and online content that seeks to inflame racial divisions – recognising that the threats to harmony today are not only local, but indeed global in nature, not only physical, but highly digital.

37. Policies such as the Ethnic Integration Policy in public housing further encourage Singaporeans of different races to live alongside one another, fostering everyday interaction and shared experiences.

38. In Singapore, our racial and religious integration is never left to chance. It is something that we consciously and continuously build.

39. It is in drafting legislation in this space that requires much more than just technical precision. It is important to get the language right, as Dr. Johnson Okello said earlier, to make sure it is clear. But I think in drafting laws that promote our racial and religious harmony unique to Singapore, it requires also an appreciation of history, our social context and our constitutional values. It requires our drafting counsel to think carefully how the law will be understood, and perhaps importantly, how it will shape behaviour.

40. Because much as we have laws that set out what you should not do, we have not really had to prosecute people under the Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act. That speaks to the salutary effect that laws have and the way in which it shapes conduct. So drafting counsel think about how that law that they draft will shape behaviour, and how it can ultimately strengthen trust across communities proactively. So, in that sense, counsel do far more than just draft the legislation. They translate a nation’s values into laws. They frame laws into the framework that becomes the social compact that exists in Singapore.

Example 2: Land Acquisition Act

41. Building a cohesive society was just one part of Singapore’s nation-building journey. Let me touch on something else, which is more physical in nature: the physical foundations of our nation.

42. For Singapore, land has always been our scarcest resource. We are a city-state of just 744 square kilometres, smaller than most countries, and indeed, smaller than many cities from where you come from. We have no hinterland and every building, every home, every school, every MRT line, every airport that we build competes for the same finite space in Singapore.

43. Our physical transformation was never simply the product of good planning or just good engineering alone. It was also made possible by good legislation.

44. The Land Acquisition Act in Singapore enabled land to be assembled in a coherent fashion for major public purposes, whether it is public housing or the airport that you might have seen when you arrived here, our MRT network that exists in the subterranean Singapore, expressways, roads, schools, hospitals.

45. Many of the places Singaporeans use every day owe their existence, in part, to a very clear, comprehensive legislative framework that made these projects possible.

46. But legislation of this nature inevitably requires different and difficult balances. On the one hand are the rights of individuals to own and enjoy private property. On the other hand is the broader public interest in ensuring that scarce land can be used to meet national needs – not just for today, but across different generations.

47. Finding that balance is indeed that polycentric work that I mentioned earlier, requiring the simultaneous reconciliation by our drafting counsel of constitutional principles, property rights, administrative fairness, fiscal constraints that we face, and of course, our own planning imperatives.

48. These are ultimately policy choices. But they become reality only when translated properly into legislation.

49. Therefore, drafting the Land Acquisition Act over time, as well as amending it over time, required grappling with constitutional principles, property rights, administrative law and competing public interests, as well as anticipating how the legislation would operate not just on the day of enactment, but decades into the future as Singapore progresses.

50. On that score, the drafting teams that we had over many generations were not just drafters. They did not just put words into motion. They were really integrators, bringing together different disciplines, different professions, and reconciling competing interests into a coherent legal framework.

51. When you travel around Singapore, when you admire Singapore’s skyline, you travel on the MRT or you take your flight from Changi Airport, we naturally think of the planners, the engineers, the architects who make all this happen. Rarely do we think of our legislative counsel. But I think in Singapore, it bears underscoring that without the work that they have done many years ago and continue to do as we update the legislation, the framework that they helped to create, much of that transformation would probably not have happened, at least on this scale and to this extent. The work that all of you do across different countries - I use our land acquisition as an example in Singapore, but I am sure the same example applies to many of you in your own home countries - may not always be visible front and centre, but the impact really can be felt and seen all around.

Example 3: Online Crime and Harms

52. My third example concerns the online space, a challenge that I think almost every one of us in this room will recognise or will have to confront.

53. Indeed, the law must keep pace with the world, and the world does not wait. New technologies emerge, new behaviours will take root in response to those new technologies, and unfortunately, new harms will appear. We must be ready to respond because much as technology has changed our lives for the better, it has also transformed the nature of harm.

54. Falsehoods, for example, can circle the globe in minutes. Artificial intelligence (AI) can generate convincing deepfakes in seconds. Scammers, which Lucien spoke about earlier, can target thousands of victims at once, often from jurisdictions outside of where the victims reside, beyond the reach of any single country’s law enforcement. Individuals, and in our case, particularly women and children, can be subjected to harassment, to doxxing and to image-based abuse, with harmful content spreading very quickly, and proving almost impossible to remove.

55. The World Economic Forum consistently ranks misinformation and disinformation amongst the most significant global risks, while cybercrime costs the global economy trillions of dollars annually. Just taking some numbers to give you a sense of the scale of the problem. According to Cybersecurity Ventures’ estimates, cybercrime cost US$1 trillion per year worldwide in 2020, and it is projected to increase to US$1 trillion per month by 2031.¹ That just shows you the scale of the problem that we are confronted with.

56. In Singapore, as you have heard earlier, we have not been spared. In 2025 alone, there were more than 37,000 scam cases, with losses in Singapore alone exceeding S$900 million – roughly S$100,000 every hour, and that is staggering. This came down from the year before in 2024, which was about S$1 billion. But it still represents a very, very high number, and one which we work very hard at to bring down.

57. But the sum total of these developments, progress in technology, and the advent of AI, have forced us to confront a fundamental question: Can the legal frameworks that we are comfortable with, that we have grown familiar with, designed perhaps more for the physical world, be adequate enough to protect people in the new online space, in the new digital age?

58. Increasingly, we found the answer to be no. Rather than relying on a single omnibus law, what we have done is we have developed a suite of legislative responses through Acts of Parliament, each of them addressing a different dimension of the problem. I thought I would share some examples with you to give you a sense of how we have responded to the online space. This is really far from the last word on the issue because technology, and indeed generative AI, is developing at such a fast pace.

59. First, let me talk a little bit about the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act. We recognise that falsehoods spread far more quickly than the truth. Rather than relying solely on criminal sanctions or content removal, which takes time, what the Act does is that it allows for quick correction directions. Users continue to see the original post. So, you might have a post that has falsehoods that perhaps undermine public interest. That post is not removed, it is not taken down. What this Act does is that it provides for a right of response, and it requires the platform to append the response with the original article so that it travels together, so that readers have a sense of perspective. You see the post, but you also see the response that corrects it. The objective is not to suppress speech, but to ensure that accurate information, more information, is available quickly, whilst preserving judicial oversight over the entire process.

60. Second, we enacted the Online Criminal Harms Act some years ago. The Act recognises that online criminal activity has become a lot more sophisticated, and law enforcement, detection, and taking down of these networks through regulatory frameworks and powers could not itself tackle the problem sufficiently. The Act therefore empowers authorities to direct the platforms to disrupt criminal activity, and requires designated online services to implement systems to reduce the risk of their services being exploited for scams and serious offences, for example, in ensuring that certain messages are framed on the platform itself, or that we scrutinise the way in which payments are made on e-commerce platforms. Preventing crime is increasingly a shared responsibility right across the entire digital ecosystem.

61. Third, the Protection from Scams Act requires us to rethink a long-standing legal assumption. You heard what I said about the increasing number of scams. The vast majority of those numbers came from seniors or those who are most vulnerable. And so, we thought carefully about what more we needed to do to protect them from scams in the online space. Traditionally, of course as we all know, the law respects individual autonomy – adults are generally free to decide how they use their own assets and resources, but scammers today employ highly sophisticated psychological manipulation. Some of them are groomed for months, if not years, over a period of time, and many victims continue transferring their life savings despite repeated warnings. In Singapore, more than 80% of scam reports involved self-effected transfers – those who do it voluntarily because they believe very much in the story that scammers have told them.

62. I shared at another conference just two days ago, the psychological hold that scammers can have on their victims that can be really striking, and quite pernicious over time. In one egregious case, our police officers, after detecting the scam, called the victim down to the station for an interview. They brought the victim down and interviewed the victim, told the victim that you are part of a scam syndicate, you have been brought in to divulge details of the bank account and to transfer money. The victim, after having been brought to the police station, did not believe that she was in a legitimate police station. She thought that the policemen interviewing her were the scammers, and she reported the police to the scammers. It is a funny story in hindsight, but when you think about the implications and the ramifications, and how much into her head the scammers must have gotten into, I think that is a problem. So, this and other examples led us to introduce the Protection from Scams Act.

63. What does the Act do? It introduces a carefully calibrated power – allowing the Police, in defined circumstances, to require banks to temporarily restrict certain transactions, where individuals are believed to be at imminent risk of being scammed. It is something that we thought long and hard about, because it is quite interventionist. But given the scale of the problem and the nature of our society, many Singaporeans are plugged in very much online. I think the target is for Singaporeans to be hooked onto these websites and scam platforms, and we felt that this was the way to go. Our one-and-a-half years or so of history since the Act was enacted has shown that this has been one of the critical tools in bringing the scam numbers down since 2024.

64. More recently, Singapore enacted the Online Safety (Relief and Accountability) Act. Governments of course rightly focus on regulating harmful content, but victims too have a more immediate concern. They simply want the harm to stop. They want images of them, they want publications of them - some of them deeply personal but could be completely manufactured - to be taken down, to be removed.

65. The scale of the problem, which we studied before we went into Parliament on this piece of legislation, is significant. In 2024, one in three Singaporeans reported experiencing some form of online harm, with women and young people disproportionately affected. I suspect it is probably similar in many other jurisdictions. Once harmful material is posted online, it can spread within minutes and persist indefinitely, continuing the harm caused on the victim for some time to come. For many victims, existing legal remedies were too slow, too costly or too complex to provide meaningful help. When you look at the individual against the big platforms, with scale, size and resources, I think it is always going to be a one-sided affair.

66. The Act therefore established an independent Online Safety Commission, which in fact began operations just about two weeks ago, providing victims with a dedicated and accessible avenue to seek timely relief – directing harmful content to be removed in the appropriate cases, disabling offending accounts, or requiring other measures to stop the harm quickly. One resource that the Commission has is the ability to direct the platform to un-anonymise the post in certain cases and to divulge the identity to the person who has shown prima facie that he or she has suffered harm. In this way, I believe that it helps to regulate the space and allows people who believe that they can post materials online anonymously to have some pause for thought.

67. Across these four pieces of legislation, the legal issues are no doubt quite different. Yet they share a common philosophy: that the law cannot remain static whilst technology evolves. Our users of the legal system, our people in Singapore - – they shop online, they conduct activities online, they have social media connections online. All of that is good, but we find that the harmful element of the online space needed something that was different and novel, and we intervened.

68. But for the counsel who drafts this, all of this, again going back to my point earlier, requires a deeper appreciation – not just of the right levers, the right legal interventions, but to understand the impact of emerging technologies, to understand the fast evolving criminal behaviour and modus operandi, as well as to understand how online platforms work, and at a more personal level, to understand how humans respond to the psychological impact of scammers.

69. Increasingly, our drafters bring together different disciplines, reconcile competing interests, and translate complex policy into legislation that is effective today, whilst remaining sufficiently flexible for tomorrow. As technologies evolve, grow stronger, grow more powerful, we must ensure that it is at least fit for purpose in the immediate future as well. We are therefore no longer drafting laws only for today’s technologies. We have to ensure that our laws can stand the test of time, even for technologies that perhaps might not be invented today or not prevalent today.

Access to Justice

70. These examples I have shared illustrate an important point – good policy alone is not going to be enough. It must be translated each time into good drafting and good legislation, and any good legislation should not only achieve its policy objectives, but also be clear, coherent and accessible.

71. It leads me to my final point, which is that the law that we have spoken about, whether it is in racial and religious harmony, or in the way in which we order ourselves with our assets in Singapore, or to deal with the online space, they must, as far as possible, be accessible to everyone. They must be understood as far as possible by everyone. Access to justice should begin long before anyone steps into a courtroom. It therefore begins with access to the law itself.

72. In this regard, the Singapore Statutes Online, maintained by the Attorney-General’s Chambers in Singapore (AGC), gives anyone with internet access free access to every Act of Parliament and subsidiary legislation. It is all available online, free.

73. In 2021, the Law Revision Commission and the AGC completed a universal revision of Singapore’s legislation – more than 510 Acts of Parliament spanning some 72,000 pages of legislation were reviewed and modernised, with obsolete and archaic language, which people could not understand, removed and drafting simplified, whilst at the same time preserving the substantive meaning of the law. It was a massive task, but one which was a really worthwhile endeavour.

74. I know Dr. Okello gave a quote earlier about how laws are to be clear. But let me give you something from none other than Einstein, who is credited with saying, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” I think that is the principle behind how we undertook a really massive task to draft it in simple language, so that every last lay person who would come across the law would be able to understand. I think the same principle must be said of our drafting. The clearer our laws are, the easier it is for our citizens to understand their rights, for businesses to comply, and of course for the courts to apply the law consistently.

Conclusion

75. These examples I have shared, I hope, gives you an idea of Singapore’s journey – what we have embarked on, how we have undertaken that task. Not every one of them will be relevant to your own jurisdiction, nor should it be, because every country will have its own history, its own values, its own social compact, and its own aspirations. I believe that laws must reflect all of that in every society. Good legislation will always reflect the values of each specific circumstance in the society.

76. But while our laws may differ, the responsibility of each of you in this room is one that we all share. You work under real constraints – you work under real constraints, which I deeply appreciate. Lucien mentioned that we had about 50 Acts of Parliament passed just last year alone, and I think that speaks volumes. If you discount the two months in the year which we do not sit – that is something like five Acts of Parliament passed on a Second Reading every sitting every month. You work under tight timelines, sometimes difficult, complex briefs. You get briefs that reflect concerns that, of course, the Government has, policies that we want to enact, which, as I said, is polycentric – different ideals and different facets of interest as well.

77. Every society will look up to its laws, however, to reflect its values, provide certainty and command public confidence. That is where, I believe, places a special responsibility on each of you. You are entrusted not just with drafting, but with ensuring that the law gives faithful effect to policy, that it works well and fairly in practice, and that it stands the test of time.

78. Oftentimes, when it works well, people rarely stop to ask who drafted it. They simply go about their daily lives, with the quiet confidence that the society they live in, and the law of that society is fair, clear and reliable, and when they need it, they will be able to rely on it. So, no one really speaks about the draftsmen.

79. But perhaps that itself is the true measure of success: not that people notice the drafting, as Dr Okello said, people only notice it when it has gone wrong, but that they can rely on the law, safe in the quiet confidence that we have a system and we have draftsmen who can reflect and translate our policy, our societal values, into law.

80. I hope this conference will indeed be an opportunity for all of you to exchange ideas, to build on the thought leadership, to debate difficult questions and hopefully to learn from one another. Because whilst no two jurisdictions are identical, I think commonality in values and aspirations means that there are many ideas and many stories we can share, which will help us to level up in terms of our knowledge. So, return home not with a desire to replicate another jurisdiction’s laws, but with fresh perspectives that can be adapted to your own legal systems and the needs of your own societies.

81. We all come from different countries, with perhaps different legal traditions, histories and cultures, but I believe we are united by a shared commitment, which is why CALC has stood the test of time: to craft laws that are clear, principled, effective, that serve the people who depend on them.

82. With that, I wish you a very fruitful conference, meaningful discussions and, importantly, a very enjoyable stay in Singapore.

83. Thank you very much.

^{1. Cybercrime to Cost the World $12.2 Trillion Annually by 2031: https://cybersecurityventures.com/official-cybercrime-report-2025/.}↩

Last updated on 15 July 2026