A History of Human Rights Society in Singapore

To celebrate Singapore's fiftieth anniversary for its independence from Malaysia in 2015, 35 students, academics and activists came together to discuss and write about pioneering Singaporean human rights activists and their under-reported stories in Singapore. The city-state is known for its remarkable economic success while having strict laws on individual freedom in the name of national security, public order and racial harmony. Singapore's tough stance on human rights, however, does not negate the long and persistent existence of a human rights society that is little known to the world until today. This volume, composed of nine distinctive chapters, records a history of human rights activists, their campaigns, main contentions with the government, survival strategies and other untold stories in Singapore's first 50 years of state-building.

Jiyoung Song is Director of Migration and Border Protection at the Lowy Institute in Sydney and joins the Asia Institute of the University of Melbourne in July 2017.

List of Figures List of Tables Acknowledgement Foreword Introduction Chapter 1 Tracing the History of the Anti-Death Penalty Movements in Singapore Chapter 2 Inhuman Punishment and Human Rights Activism in the Little Red Dot Chapter 3 Singapore's Press for Freedom: Between Media Regulation and Activism Chapter 4 Activism on Arbitrary Detention, the Suspension of Law Chapter 5 Socio-Economic Rights Activism in Singapore Chapter 6 Shifting boundaries: state-society relations and activism on migrant worker rights in Singapore Chapter 7 Against a Teleological Reading of the Advancement of Women's Rights in Singapore Chapter 8 LGBTQ Activism in Singapore Chapter 9 Navigating Through the 'Rules' of Civil Society: In search of disability rights in Singapore Index