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In June 2003, the government adopted the Declaration on Religious Harmony as part of a multipronged strategy to address the problem of aggravated ethnic-religious relations, heightened after the discovery of the bomb plot masterminded by Jemaah lslamiah, a group affiliated with Al Qaeda. This instrument belongs to a corpus of 'constitutional soft law', a set of precepts embodied in a text lacking legal status which exerts some degree of legal impact and influences the shaping of state-society relations. Such informal standards shed light on the politico-legal culture, process values of participatory democracy and the practical workings of institutional restraints on public power and governance. This article examines the role of these informal standards within the context of a written constitution, with a particular focus on the Declaration-whose principles have implications for the scope and practice of religious liberty in Singapore, a secular state with a religious society.
I. INTRODUCTION
On 9 June 2003, the government adopted the Declaration on Religious Harmony ('DRH')3 as part of a multi-pronged strategy to combat the threat aggravated ethnic-religious relations posed towards internal stability and the social cohesion of Singapore's multi-religious2 population. This flowed from the discovery of the terrorist bomb plot masterminded by members of Jemaah Islamiah ('JI'), a 'self-proclaimed Islamic group' in December 2001 with links to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda group. JI members were preventively detained under the Internal security Act ('ISA').3 Heightened religious sensitivities and race relations were exacerbated by the 'tudung controversy'4 of January-February 2002 where the government ban on wearing Muslim headscarf in public schools was criticized as impinging upon religious freedom and minority cultural identity. Singapore's geo-political vulnerability as a Chinese majority city-state surrounded by Muslim majority nations5 was underscored when Brunei and Malaysia criticized the treatment of Singapore's Malay minority community.6 These developments were associated with religious revivalism and the 'radicalization of parts of Muslim societies'7 over the past 30 years especially in South-East Asia, where Muslims were increasingly 'more orthodox, behaving like the Arabs.'8
Against this heightened security imperative, the pressing need to consolidate racial ties and win the 'ideological battle',9 then Prime Minister ('PM') Goh Chok Tong mooted the idea of having a Code on Religious Harmony in October 2002. The proposed draft sought to Outline the principles'...