By Jewel Philemon
Imagine organizing an event for a hundred people. You make reservations at a hotel, invite special guests, members of the press, and pull out all the stops to make this event a success. Now, imagine the hotel you booked cancelling your reservation at the last minute. What would you do?
This is the dilemma that the National Solidarity Party (NSP) faced when organizing its forum on managing the risks of expressing oneself on the Internet, “How to Survive the Perils of the Online World”.
Organizers Jeannette Chong Aruldoss, Ravi Philemon, Samantha D’Silva, and Steve Chia, had made reservations at the RELC International Hotel, and signed a contract, a month in advance. However, just a few days before the event, the NSP was told the event will not be allowed to go ahead.
Hotel management asked the organizers to move their event to a different venue, admitting that they had failed to notice that it was an opposition political party that wanted to use their seminar room, and that they would not have entered into a contractual agreement to lease their seminar room for the forum, if they had known that the event was being organized NSP.
The hotel was however, legally bound to the agreement. To ease RELC International Hotel’s discomfort, the NSP sought the help of publichouse.sg, the co-organizer’s of the event, to re-book the venue in PH’s name.
‘The forum that almost wasn’t’ commenced as planned and saw a turnout of about a hundred people. The second in a series of forums designed to generate public discourse, the event featured a panel discussion with litigation lawyers, Dr Jack Tsen-Ta Lee (Assistant Professor of Law, SMU), Peter Cuthbert Low (former Law Society President), Choo Zheng Xi (co-founder of socio-political website, The Online Citizen), and media expert Cherian George (Associate Professor, NTU), and ended with a rousing Q&A segment.
Moderated by Mr Philemon, the panelists discussed topics such as the extent and limitations of the freedoms of expression and speech, the constraints of navigating the online world, defamation laws, and lessons from past prosecutions, from a mostly legal perspective.
NSP’s Vice-President, Jeannette Chong Aruldoss, said that she considered the event a success and that the forum achieved its objectives of shedding more light on taking informed risks when engaging on socio-political issues online.
It’s hard to imagine that an informative-educational event such as this one was almost cancelled, just because it was organised by an opposition party. I’m glad that the muzzle on the opposition parties and on those that offer contrarian views have not yet been extended to the Internet. The online world continues to remain the most open 'public square' Singaporeans have for public discourse.