CRUSADING journalist and former British Weekly staffer Alan Shadrake is to be honored by the pioneering organization Human Rights Watch with a grant from the organization’s Lillian Hellman/Dashiell Hammett Fund – in “recognition of his courage in the face of persecution.”
Shadrake served a six-week sentence in Singapore’s notorious Changi jail earlier this year for writing a hard-hitting expose of the criminal justice system in the city state. The book, entitled: “Once a Jolly Hangman, Singapore’s Justice System in the Dock”, shed light on Singapore’s unequal application of the death penalty and, most embarrassingly for the country’s ruling People’s Action Party, scooped a devastating interview with the country’s unapologetic hangman, Darshan Singh.
The veteran British journalist – who cut his journalistic teeth in West Berlin at the height of the Cold War – has become something of a celebrity to Singapore’s burgeoning pro-democratic youth movement, whose demands for political reform are bringing uncomfortable pressure to bear on the PAP, who have ruled the country continuously since independence from Britain in 1965.
Shadrake told the BW this week: “I’m planning on returning soon to (neighboring) Malaysia. My publisher there will stage a late launch of the new edition of the Jolly Hangman aimed at Singapore. It will actually be in Johor just across the border and I have suggested using a studio link or Skype to the same venue in Singapore we used last year (where Shadrake was arrested). This time they wont’ be able to arrest me!”
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