Response by Minister for Law K Shanmugam at the Committee of Supply Debate 2024

01 MAR 2024

1 Mar 2024 Posted in Parliamentary speeches and responses

  1. Mr Chairman, thank you.
  1. The Ministry of Law’s (MinLaw’s) work, as Members will know, touches on a number of aspects. This includes:

(a) Maintaining a legal system that is robust, fair, and effective;

(b) Enhancing access to justice; and

(c) Supporting our economic and social vibrancy.

  1. We have made good progress and we intend to do more.
  1. I will focus on two areas:

(a) One, how can we help the vulnerable better get help when they deal with the criminal and civil law systems; and

(b) Two, how can we better help resolve family law disputes.

  1. My colleagues, Second Minister Edwin Tong and SPS Rahayu Mahzam will touch on the other key areas in MinLaw’s work.

(I) HELPING THE VULNERABLE ACCESS THE CRIMINAL AND CIVIL LAW SYSTEMS

  1. First, on access to the criminal and civil law systems, we are focused on ensuring access to justice, especially for the most vulnerable in our community.
  1. In this context, the Public Defender’s Office (PDO) and the Legal Aid Bureau (LAB) have been doing good work.

A. Public Defender’s Office

  1. PDO helps to facilitate access to justice for accused persons.
  1. It was set up in December 2022, as a department within MinLaw, to institutionalise public defence within our criminal justice system. Before that, the Government funded access to criminal defence via the Criminal Legal Aid Scheme (CLAS), which was run by the Law Society.
  1. When PDO was established, criminal defence aid was made available to more people, by raising the means threshold from the 25th to the 35th percentile of resident households based on per capita household income and allowing aid for most non-capital criminal offences, with some exceptions.
  1. Mr Raj Joshua Thomas and Mr Derrick Goh asked for updates on PDO’s work.
  1. As of December 2023, we have received about 1,700 applications. Of these, almost half were assessed as eligible for criminal defence aid.
  1. With our ongoing partnership with Pro Bono SG, eligible applicants receive representation from either PDO or from criminal lawyers working with CLAS.
  1. As of December 2023, PDO has a team of 16 Public Defenders and they represented more than 440 accused in Court.
  1. As pointed out by Mr Goh, the complexity and impact of PDO cases go beyond legal matters.
  1. Let me give you one example. I will call the gentleman “Mr N”. He is a tingkat delivery driver.

(a) He is married with two young children with special needs. He brings them to childcare and school. He meets with their teachers, attends their speech therapy classes and follow-ups at the hospital. His wife is not actively involved in the caregiving. He needed money urgently to cover daily living expenses and his children’s therapy sessions. He borrowed $1,000 from an unlicensed moneylender and he was subsequently harassed.

(b) Threats were made against his children. He felt he had no choice but to assist the unlicensed moneylender in its illegal operations, and he was subsequently charged for doing so. We have to take a serious view of this because that then potentially leads to scams and people losing lots of money, including the elderly. So, if you want to prevent all of that, you need to take tough steps and draw a line when people assist illegal moneylenders. Prior to these charges, he had a clean record. Mr N could have expected a sentence of around 8 to 12 months’ imprisonment. This would have meant that his children with special needs would be left without care during Mr N’s prison term.

(c) The Public Defender explained his situation to the Prosecution, and also pleaded with the Court for a lighter sentence. The Public Defender also referred Mr N to a social service agency to assess the care plan for his children. Eventually, the Court gave a sentence of 6 weeks’ imprisonment with a fine. The Court also agreed to defer his sentence, to allow Mr N to ease his child’s transition into Primary 1 at a special needs school. I will add that Mr N recently surrendered himself to the Court and he will serve his sentence.

  1. This is one of many examples where PDO has positively impacted the lives of accused persons.
  1. And it is a good start. We will continue to strengthen PDO, its capability and capacity to help more vulnerable persons.

B. Legal Aid Bureau

  1. Moving on to civil legal aid, last year was LAB’s 65th year of providing legal aid, assistance and advice to the less privileged.
  1. It was set up in 1958, started out as a small team of 15 staff to provide legal aid to needy persons. Today, it is a department with about 50 in-house lawyers, support staff, as well as more than 140 Assigned Solicitors. These are lawyers from private practice who work with LAB.
  1. LAB helps with various civil matters, including matrimonial matters, monetary claims and probate matters.
  1. Over the years, it has helped many people. Again, I give you one example - a 101-year-old lady. LAB helped her to reclaim her life savings from her own daughter. This old lady spoke no English, only Hokkien. She had been put in a nursing home by her daughter. Her daughter began withdrawing monies from the old lady’s bank account and directed the applicant’s Government financial assistance payouts to her, meaning the daughter’s own bank account. Her daughter alleged that the applicant had no mental capacity, and refused to return the monies. The applicant, the old lady, checked herself out of her nursing home and asked LAB for help. LAB helped her to secure a court order for her daughter to return all her monies, with interest.
  1. To ensure that aid is provided to those who cannot afford a lawyer, we require applicants for aid to undergo means testing, and SPS Rahayu Mahzam will speak about the means assessment of our legal aid and criminal defence aid schemes.

C. Conditional Fee Arrangements

  1. There are also other possible mechanisms to increase access to justice besides Government legal aid and assistance. One of them is conditional fee agreements (CFAs).
  1. CFAs have the potential to help people access justice faster, easier, when they do not qualify for legal aid, but also find it challenging to pay the full costs of litigation in the Courts. CFAs can help litigants, who are unable to fork out the full legal fees at the outset, by providing an additional funding option, to pursue their claims.
  1. However, it is not an unvarnished benefit, if you look at the example of other countries, which is why we have been and we continue to be careful about it, because you have got to weigh against these possible benefits, some well-known potential negative consequences of CFAs, and these are visible in other places.
  1. So far in Singapore, we have permitted CFAs in arbitration proceedings, certain proceedings in the Singapore International Commercial Court, and court and mediation proceedings, which are related to these proceedings where CFAs have been allowed.
  1. So, we refer to Mr Zhulkarnain’s question on whether we will extend CFAs to other categories of proceedings. Our approach is, as far as possible, we will see what other means there are available to allow access to justice in an easier way and then study the applicability of CFAs, the usefulness of CFAs, the positive and negative consequences, by extending to other domestic litigation proceedings.

(II) REFINING DISPUTE RESOLUTION TO SUPPORT FAMILIES

  1. I will move now to the second part of my speech.
  1. We have invested considerable time, energy and resources to streamline and help people in the family justice system. Where families have breakdowns, their relationships fray, they go to Court, we want to try and minimise the pain for those who have to be involved in the legal process. The disputes often involve a lot of emotions, psychological wounds and children are often caught in the crossfire.
  1. That is why, for some time now, we have taken a different approach from the usual litigation process. For family cases, our Courts focus on therapeutic justice, which is about getting parties to establish common ground and move on with their lives. The changes we have made, over the years, to the family justice system reflect this approach, this philosophy.
  1. As Ms Hany Soh referred: a major review was done in 2013, which resulted in, among other things, the establishment of the Family Justice Courts (FJC). Specialised FJC with specialised judges, with its own head of the FJC. Measures were introduced in divorce cases to help these cases proceed more smoothly and reduce animosity as much as possible. And the focus was also on seeking to protect the child’s welfare.

(a) One very important measure is the simplified divorce track. For those on this track, it saves a lot of time. Parties do not need to attend court. The divorce proceedings are concluded within a much shorter timeframe and is available to all parties who agree on the divorce and ancillary matters at the outset. And you can imagine: it helps to reduce acrimony. It is an incentive for parties to come to an agreement on the issues. They spend less time in Court.

(b) If you take the past year, there were a total of 6,220 divorce cases. Of that, more than 4,000 - to be precise, around 4,150, or 66% of divorce cases - actually went on the simplified track and almost half of these cases involved children. You can imagine if these 4,000 cases were handled under the normal litigation process. The amount of time, the money, the acrimony and impact on the children. So, all of that has been considerably reduced. This is a significant number of couples, over 4,000 couples, their children, who we hope were better able to move on with their lives with as little acrimony as possible. Of those cases that go on the simplified track, the 4,150, 94% were resolved within 6 months. So it is much quicker, much less costly.

(c) Where the divorce or ancillary matters are contested, FJC offers free inhouse mediation and counselling, if certain criteria are met. Around 930 out of 1,060 cases that went through mediation were fully or partially settled. That is about 88%.

  1. In September 2019, we set up a second Committee co-chaired by MinLaw, the Ministry for Social and Family Development (MSF) and FJC. And a slew of further recommendations were made to strengthen the therapeutic justice elements and address some of the challenges in the new family justice system. The recommendations of this new Committee have been progressively implemented: the Women’s Charter was amended last year; MinLaw’s and MSF’s Family Justice Reform Act was passed last year; and a number of non-legislative initiatives have been undertaken by MSF and FJC.
  1. One of the key issues that the Family Justice Reform Act addressed is the enforcement of maintenance orders.
  1. Members of Parliament have spoken about this. We observed a fairly high incidence of non-compliance with maintenance orders and a significant number of repeat applications for enforcement, usually by the ex-wife applying repeatedly to enforce the maintenance orders.
  1. The Family Justice Reform Act introduced a new Maintenance Enforcement Process (MEP) which would help to address these issues. Under the MEP, there is a new unit of officers called Maintenance Enforcement Officers (MEOs). They will be established under MinLaw. MEOs will be empowered to obtain information about the parties’ financial circumstances directly from the parties or from third parties, such as banks and Government agencies. That will relieve applicants from having to go around, instruct lawyers to apply to Court to get the information, that takes time, effort and cost - and usually, there is also non-compliance. So, when the respondent is non-cooperative, it can go on and on for months - sometimes years. But the MEOs will be empowered. People have to answer them. The information, hopefully, should be obtained faster.

(a) With more accurate and clear information, the MEO and the Courts will be better able to distinguish between respondents who cannot pay and respondents who refuse to pay. For those who refuse to pay, the system, the MEP, strengthens the deterrence against them. The Court will monitor payments, typically for around 6 months, and failure to pay can lead to imprisonment. This system should hopefully help reduce repeated defaulters.

  1. Ms Hany Soh asked about the implementation of the Family Justice Reform Act. Some of the technical amendments were commenced in January this year. The other reforms will be implemented in stages. In particular, we are targeting to operationalise the MEP in phases, starting from the second half of this year.
  1. Ms Soh also asked about collaborations with stakeholders. MinLaw works closely with MSF and FJC to improve the family justice system. Between us, we have regular conversations with the family bar, counsellors, mental health experts and community partners about how best to support families in distress. We also conduct regular outreach to various segments. I ask the public to share about family justice initiatives and therapeutic justice.
  1. The aim remains pretty much the same: reduce acrimony, preserve relationships and protect children. And we can say, the situation has vastly improved since these amendments were put in place for some time now.

(IV) CONCLUSION

  1. Mr Chairman, to sum up, we have been building steadily on our progress over the last few years. We have taken significant steps and will continue to work on:

(a) Helping the vulnerable through the criminal and civil law systems; and

(b) Enhancing dispute resolution in family disputes.

Last updated on 1 Mar 2024