Mr. Tan Chin-Tiong
Ambassador of Singapore to Japan
5-12-3 Roppongi
Minato-Ku, Tokyo 106-0032

November 14, 2006

Dear Mr. Tan,

On behalf of our club and the foreign correspondents clubs of Jakarta, Hong Kong, China and Thailand, we wish to express our deep concern at the recent decision by the Singapore Ministry of Information, Communication and the Arts to ban the Hong Kong-based opinion magazine Far Eastern Economic Review. We particularly note the fact that it is now a criminal offense to subscribe to FEER or import or reproduce it for distribution.

We believe this is measure badly tarnishes Singapore’s reputation as a first-world economy and an open society that respects differences of opinion and freedom of speech. We urge the Singapore government to reverse the ban.

Whatever the government’s disagreement with FEER, we believe that Singaporean society is strong enough to withstand criticism from a well-established monthly magazine with just three journalists and 1,000 subscribers in the whole country.

We also note several recent initiatives by the Ministry of Information to restrict the activities of the media in Singapore, notably the demand that foreign publications post a bond of S$200,000.

In our view, these measures suggest a besieged and insecure country rather than the affluent, self-confident nation Singapore has become in the last two decades. Furthermore, we suggest that restricting the free flow of information is not the right approach for a country with ambitions to become Asia’s top financial hub.

We applaud the government's repeated declarations in recent years to open up Singaporean society and urge it to safeguard press freedoms while it does this since we believe this to be one of the cornerstones of modern society.

Along with thousands of other journalists around the world, we will be watching the FEER case closely.

Sincerely,

Dennis Normile, President

David McNeill, Chair, Freedom of the Press Committee

On behalf of:

John Aglionby, President, The Jakarta Foreign Correspondents’ Club
Ian Williams, President, The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand
Christopher Slaughter, President, The Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong
Melinda Liu, President, The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China