Chng Suan Tze v. Minister for Home Affairs

Chng Suan Tze v Minister for Home Affairs
The Old Supreme Court Building, Singapore, photographed in April 2007
Court	Court of Appeal of Singapore
Full case name	Chng Suan Tze v. Minister for Home Affairs and others and other appeals
Decided	8 December 1988
Citation(s)	[1988] SGCA 16, [1988] 2 S.L.R.(R.) 525
Case history
Prior action(s)	De Souza Kevin Desmond v. Minister for Home Affairs [1988] 1 S.L.R.(R.) 464, H.C.; Teo Soh Lung v. Minister for Home Affairs [1988] 2 S.L.R.(R.) 30, H.C.
Related action(s)	Teo Soh Lung v. Minister for Home Affairs [1989] 1 S.L.R.(R.) 461, H.C.; [1990] 1 S.L.R.(R.) 347, C.A.; Cheng Vincent v. Minister for Home Affairs [1990] 1 S.L.R.(R.) 38, H.C.
Case opinions
Exercise of discretion by President and Minister for Home Affairs under ss. 8 and 10 of the Internal Security Act subject to judicial review by a court as an objective rather than subjective test applies.
Court membership
Judge(s) sitting	Wee Chong Jin C.J., L.P. Thean and Chan Sek Keong JJ.

Chng Suan Tze v. Minister for Home Affairs is a seminal case in administrative law decided by the Court of Appeal of Singapore in 1988. The Court decided the appeal in the appellants' favour on a technical ground, but considered obiter dicta the reviewability of government power in preventive detention cases under the Internal Security Act ("ISA"). The case approved the application by the court of an objective test in the review of government discretion under the ISA, stating that all power has legal limits and the rule of law demands that the courts should be able to examine the exercise of discretionary power. This was a landmark shift from the position in the 1971 High Court decision Lee Mau Seng v. Minister of Home Affairs, which had been an authority for the application of a subjective test until it was overruled by Chng Suan Tze.

Chng Suan Tze was followed by amendments by Parliament to the Constitution and the ISA in 1989 which purported to return the applicable law regarding judicial review of government discretion under the ISA to that in Lee Mau Seng. The legality of these changes was challenged in Teo Soh Lung v. Minister for Home Affairs (1990). In that decision, the Court of Appeal affirmed that the legislative amendments to the Act were plain and unambiguous, and thus validly established that the subjective test of judicial review now applied to internal security matters.

Between May and June 1987, the appellants Chng Suan Tze, Kevin Desmond de Souza, Teo Soh Lung and Wong Souk Yee were arrested by the Internal Security Department (ISD) during Operation Spectrum for alleged involvement in a Marxist conspiracy to subvert and destabilize the country. Detention orders were made against the appellants under section 8(1)(a) of the Internal Security Act by the Minister for Home Affairs and Law, S. Jayakumar, directing that they be detained for one year. The provision empowers the Minister to make an order directing that a person be detained if the President is satisfied that detention is necessary to prevent the person from endangering, among other things, the security or public order of Singapore.