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27 Hong Kong L.J. 152 (1997)
An I for an I - Singapore's Communitarian Model of Constitutional Adjudication

handle is hein.journals/honkon27 and id is 160 raw text is: AN 'i' FOR AN T? SINGAPORE'S COMMUNITARIAN MODEL OF CONSTITUTIONAL ADJUDICATION E Thio Li-ann* Introduction: cultural values and differing conceptions of the 'I' At the heart of a constitutional bill of rights which is designed to secure liberties and to guarantee fundamental human rights is the espousal of a political philosophy which stands opposed to absolutism. By delimiting an area of individual autonomy or non-restraint, a bill of rights recognises a dichotomy between the legitimate and illegitimate extension of government regulation into an individual's 'sphere of privacy.' It serves primarily to benefit the individual through providing a measure of protection against possible undue encroachments by the leviathan state into the sphere of civil liberties. This constitutes an a priori affirmation of the normative worth of the individual, harking back to the Judeo-Christian doctrine of personality1 or secularised versions thereof, for example the Kantian categorical imperative which advocates treating the individual as the end and never merely the means. Thus, such 'natural rights'2 inhere in individuals qua human beings and are inalien- able (pre-governmental); they are 'positivised' as part of the lex scripta through being given expression in written constitutions such as the Chapter on Fundamental Liberties found in Part IV of the Republic of Singapore Constitution.3 This grand concept must be translated into actual realisation, if constitu- tional guarantees4 of individual liberties are to be more than paper tigers. To the Lecturer, Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore. This article is a truncated and modified version of a paper 'Constitutional Review: Influences Beyond the Four Walls: Human Rights, Constitutional Liberties and the Singapore Experience' which was presented at the Third Biennial LAWASIA Comparative Constitutional Law Conference, 'Constitutions in an Interdependent World: The Impact of Intemationalisation on Governance in the Asia-Pacific Region,' Macau, 18- 20 November 1996. Carl J Friedrich writes: 'the insistence upon the individual as the final value, the emphasis upon the transcendental importance of each man's soul, creates an insoluble conflict with any sort of absolutism': Limited Government: A Comparison (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1974), pp 12-13. 2 David Sidorsky, 'Contemporary Reinterpretations of the Concept of Human Rights' in Sidorsky (ed), Essays on Human Rights (1979), p 88 (reproduced in Steiner and Alston, International Human Rights in Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp 170-2). 3 On seceding from Malaysia in August 1965, Singapore pragmatically made certain provisions of the Federal Constitution of Malaysia applicable with notable omissions (exclusion of the right to property) and modifications (amending the religious liberty clause to reflect the principle of secularism) through the Republic of Singapore Independence Act (1965). See Kevin Y L Tan, 'The Evolution of Singapore's Modem Constitution: Developments from 1945 to the Present Day' (1989) 1 Singapore Academy of Law Journal 1. 4 See generally Roscoe Pound, The Development of Constitutional Guarantees of Liberty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).

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