Christopher de Souza: If I can save one person, it will be worth it

SINGAPORE - Earlier this month, Mr Christopher de Souza, an MP for Holland-Bukit Timah GRC, introduced a Private Member's Bill in Parliament which seeks to fight human trafficking. Private Member's Bills, which are introduced by MPs who are not ministers, are rare.

The last such Bill to be successfully passed was the Maintenance of Parents Act, which was introduced by then Nominated MP Walter Woon in 1994. Mr de Souza tells Rachel Au-Yong why he has taken this step.

What sparked your interest in tackling human trafficking?

Several years ago, I started raising questions in Parliament about prostitution: the figures, raids, what we were doing to curb the vice. At that time, I was concerned that prostitution was moving into the heartland.

But that initial, clinical inquiry matured into something more. I figured there must be a story behind every person who sells her body for profit. How many are doing this voluntarily? How many are forced to do so?

Early last year, I was at a wake, and somebody came up to me and asked, "What are you doing about human trafficking?"

She soon gave me a report about how some women are trafficked out of Batam.

That got me thinking about what we were doing to assist those who are truly exploited.

So what was the result of that soul-searching?

I looked at the existing laws and realised we needed a dedicated piece of legislation to combat human trafficking.

If you look at the current laws, we have the Women's Charter, which is gender-specific, so a man can't be trafficked under this. Then there's the Children and Young Persons Act, where you have to be a certain age to be protected. Fine, we have the Penal Code for trafficking, but that definition of trafficking does not cover labour trafficking or organ-harvesting.

So we had laws, but the laws served very different ends, and there were gaps.

If we have the Prevention of Corruption Act and the Misuse of Drugs Act because we want to stamp out corruption and drugs, what more for human trafficking?

Tell me more about the process of working on the Bill.

From mid- to late-2013, I examined precedents from around the world; the United Nations' Trafficking in Persons reports, protocols on abolishing slavery, and other provisions.

Then I gave the Prime Minister (Lee Hsien Loong) and the Minister for Home Affairs (Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean) a copy of the draft Bill, explaining that I would be willing to put forward this Bill as a private member in Parliament.

The reason I gave was that we needed a dedicated piece of legislation to combat human trafficking.

I was very encouraged when both the PM and DPM said they would support the Bill.

So I worked with the Inter-Agency Taskforce (on Trafficking in Persons), helmed by both the Home Affairs and Manpower ministries, for almost a year.

We had about 10 inter-agency meetings - that's a lot. You must consider that the Bill cuts across various ministries and agencies, like Home Affairs for sexual exploitation, Manpower for labour trafficking, Social and Family Development for victims, and Health for organ-harvesting.

It was a privilege to work alongside the taskforce, which is staffed by dedicated officers committed to the cause.

Why did you want it to be a Private Member's Bill?

This is something I feel passionately about. I don't want to just point to a gap, and ask someone else to fill it.

I thought taking a stab at crafting a Bill and showing that human trafficking must be taken seriously would attract the support of the Government. And it did.

To be able to sit down with the taskforce to ensure that the Bill could be enforced was essential. There's no point in me putting on the shelf of the parliamentary library a Bill that can't be enforced.

Were there any parts of the Bill that had to be tailored for the situation in Singapore?

The Bill captures transit trafficking. My sense is that Singapore is used as a transit point, and victims are sometimes transferred here and exploited overseas.

Now the Bill is very clear that this can be considered an offence.

This might not be so relevant in a large country, where the movement of trafficking is really within the border, from rural to urban. Singapore being small, and a node for travel, transit trafficking is of concern and therefore inside the Bill.

How will the Bill eliminate or minimise trafficking?

We want to dismantle the syndicates upstream and deter them from exploiting the innocent.

The punishments are harsher, when compared to penalties under existing laws. So for first offenders it's up to 10 years' imprisonment and a $100,000 fine under the proposed Bill.

The judge also has the discretion to give up to six strokes of the cane.

And it's 11/2 times for second offenders: $150,000 fine, 15 years, up to nine strokes. But caning for a second offence is mandatory.

We are also giving more protection to victims, like the right to counselling, shelter and food.

If he or she has been sexually exploited, we will also grant an in-camera hearing, which is closed to the media and public. He or she will not come into contact with the perpetrator.

You spoke to about 300 people and representatives from various organisations during several months of public consultations. Did they raise anything that surprised you, or you did not consider before?

I was not so much surprised, but encouraged, by the level of protection that almost all the participants wanted to afford child victims of trafficking.

They wanted a lower burden of proof in such cases, and stiffer penalties. This wasn't prodded by me. It was their natural soul speaking, and almost everyone I met there had a great desire to protect the children.

Earlier in April, several civil society groups criticised the planned legislation for failing to define who is a victim of sex trafficking and addressing exploitative practices. How does your introduced Bill tackle those criticisms?

The activists wanted exploitation to be defined quite clearly, and the Bill is definitely explicit about what exploitation is now.

Now it covers not just sexual exploitation, but also slavery, labour trafficking, and forced removal of organs. And where child victims are concerned, we don't need to prove force or deception, because the vulnerability of a child is a given.

I'm more than happy to attribute the clearer definition to the activists. This is also consistent with the United Nations' Trafficking in Persons protocol.

This month, some of these activists asked for extended social support like immigration and employment rights for human trafficking victims whose cases are still ongoing. What are your views?

I share their passion and compassion for the victims, too. To that end, we have included rights to counselling, shelter and food.

But I am a little cautious, because if we were to load the Bill with too many victim rights, we might inadvertently incentivise people who are not trafficked victims to say that they are.

And that would defeat the purpose of the Bill, because we need the assistance of genuine victims to unravel and defang the syndicates which operate out of and through Singapore.

How can enforcers tell if a victim is genuine?

It's difficult to do so.

I used to work with the anti-vice branch in the Attorney- General's Chambers (AGC) before going into politics.

A few ways to assess if someone has been trafficked: you look at how long the person has been in Singapore, whether he or she has been paid, whether she can give leads in terms of syndicates.

If a person goes in and out of Singapore multiple times on a social visit pass, it's likely he or she is doing this voluntarily.

It's not always so, but those are some of the things the police look into, and what I looked into when I was at the AGC.

We were placed in Tier 2 out of four tiers in the United States' annual Trafficking in Persons report. This means Singapore has not fully complied with minimum standards to curb trafficking, but has made significant strides. Do you think the Bill will improve our standing?

I am not fussed about how external organisations wish to view us. What I am motivated by is doing the right thing for our people, and for those caught in this unfortunate web of human trafficking.

At no time was my motivation to move us up the ranking. It's just the right thing to do.

Have you had to put up with any negative feedback on wanting to help victims of trafficking, which involves the sleazy area of sex trafficking?

When we deal with human trafficking, we are dealing with the most vulnerable of the vulnerable.

The people who are caught in the web of human trafficking have few or no avenues to get out.

Rather than dispute, there was consensus that, indeed, the people who we have in mind to assist through this Bill are possibly the most vulnerable sector in this society.

Are you proud of having this Bill as part of your legacy as a politician?

This Bill reflects the beliefs of many Singaporeans. There hasn't been a single person over six consultations or through e-mail or over Meet-the-People Sessions who has disagreed with the need to have this Bill.

It has been a privilege to bring this Bill to fruition with different partners all over Singapore - the religious, the secular, the non-governmental organisations and like-minded Singaporeans.

So it's a reflection of a belief system, not a legacy.

Do you think we can expect to see more Private Member's Bills from fellow backbenchers?

I'm not sure. It's a considerable commitment, time-wise. And it must come from deep within, so you can defend it against people who guard policy, and justify why there must be shifts.

One also doesn't have to raise Bills to show he's aligned to a certain cause. There are many ways to raise concerns - through parliamentary questions or devoting lots of your Budget or Committee of Supply speech to them.

There are already colleagues who champion different causes. Take (Moulmein-Kallang GRC MP) Denise Phua, who champions special needs, for example.

What has been hard about the process of coming up with a Bill?

From the time I started writing up the Bill to now, it has been about 15 months.

At times it was tough, and so I prayed. There were so many enforcement permutations to anticipate, and we had to ensure that the Bill could cover each of these measures.

For example, on transit trafficking, we had to come up with a position, that this constitutes an offence and there would be prosecution where the evidence presents itself.

This is not an easy position to take, because you need to make sure you have the enforcement, investigative and operational ability to meet that provision.

Another thing we debated over was whether caning should be included. It's not conventional for new offences to have caning. But in the end, we rationalised it with the Moneylenders Act, where people who harass victims by throwing paint are also caned.

Harassing versus human trafficking - surely that justifies caning, right?

So things like that, having to justify positions and working late into the night with many revisions. But this is by no means a complaint. It was very satisfying, very fulfilling, and now this law is for everybody.

Do you think human trafficking, at least in Singapore, will go down if the Bill passes in November's Parliament sitting? (The authorities investigated 53 reports of sex trafficking last year, and another 49 reports with elements of labour trafficking.)

I visited a shelter run by Catholic nuns who take care of human trafficking victims. I was touched by the selflessness of the sisters, who went out of their way to care for the vulnerable victims of trafficking. That's the ethos behind the Bill. If it could save just one person, deter a syndicate from bringing in just one person, it would be worth all the effort.

Of course, I hope it will save more lives than just one.

rachelay@sph.com.sg

This article was first published on October 18, 2014.
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