Wednesday, March 23, 2016
Blogger Gets Jail Term in Singapore for Posts Said to Incite Ethnic Hatred
HONG KONG — A Japanese-Australian woman was sentenced on Wednesday to a 10-month jail term in Singapore over blog posts that besmirched foreigners in the city-state.
The woman, Ai Takagi, 23, pleaded guilty to four counts of sedition over the articles, posted on a website, called The Real Singapore, that she ran with her Singaporean husband, Yang Kaiheng. The articles “were intended from the outset to provoke unwarranted hatred against foreigners in Singapore,” District Judge Salina Ishak said on Wednesday, according to a copy of the oral grounds for her decision.Ms. Takagi was a law student in Brisbane, Australia, while she edited the website. She was arrested last year while vacationing in Singapore. Mr. Yang also faces charges, and he is scheduled to go on trial next week. He has pleaded not guilty.
Ms. Takagi, who is eight weeks pregnant, apologized in court. “I now know that the harmony which Singapore enjoys today requires careful and continuous efforts on the part of everyone, citizens and visitors alike, to maintain,” she said.
Free-speech advocates have long criticized Singapore’s tight curbs on expression, but officials say laws prohibiting the incitement of ethnic hatred are important for maintaining harmony in the country’s diverse population.
The blog was billed as a format for allowing Singaporeans to freely express their thoughts. Judge Ishak said that the comments posted in response to the articles showed they had “engendered vitriol and hatred.”
One article accused a family of Filipinos of stirring unrest over a Hindu ceremony, which prosecutors said was a falsehood. Another falsely stated that a woman from China had encouraged her grandson to urinate in a bottle while on public transit, the court ruled.
The articles got millions of page views. The blog took in more than $350,000 in advertising revenue from December 2013 to April 2015.
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