SINGAPORE: Activist Iris Koh and her husband Raymond Ng Kai Hoe have been ordered to pay S$12,000 (US$9,338) in costs to the Health Sciences Authority (HSA) after failing to mount a judicial review against the authority.
The court found that the couple’s application was an abuse of process and granted HSA’s bid for the case to be struck out entirely, a spokesperson for the Attorney-General’s Chambers (AGC) told CNA in a statement on Wednesday (Sep 25).
HSA was represented in the hearing on Sep 19 by representatives from AGC’s civil division, according to the judiciary’s public hearing list.
Koh, who has changed her Chinese name from Shu Cii to Hsiao Pei, is the founder of Healing the Divide, a group with a known stance against COVID-19 vaccination.
The 48-year-old Singaporean and her husband had filed an application for a judicial review, a process where the High Court exercises its supervisory function over a public body.
Their aim was to get a mandatory order for HSA to investigate and prosecute entities using celebrities to advertise vaccination, according to the AGC spokesperson.
In response, AGC acted on behalf of HSA and filed an application to have the case struck out.
This was on the basis that HSA had already investigated the matter, and that the couple was seeking “an academic or hypothetical interpretation of the law which was an abuse of the court’s process”, the AGC spokesperson said.
The judge ruled that the judicial review application sought by Koh and her husband “disclosed no reasonable cause of action, was an abuse of process, and it was in the interests of justice to strike it out”, said the AGC spokesperson.
After ordering that the application be struck out in its entirety, the judge also ordered Koh and her husband to pay HSA a total of S$12,000 in costs.
They are for the striking out application as well as two other applications the couple had brought.
In a Facebook post after the hearing, Koh asked for support to pay the costs of S$12,000.
She wrote that the case was struck out “based on the issue of standing” and that the judge said the couple was “unable to adequately address the point about ‘special damages'”.
“Despite this setback, we’ve learned a great deal from this experience about the complexities of pursuing a judicial review,” wrote Koh. “This knowledge will be invaluable as we consider future actions to uphold public rights.”
She noted two lessons – that the bar for striking out is high, but the bar for a judicial review is “even higher”.
“The process and lessons learnt will help us prepare for the next JR,” she wrote.
Koh and her husband have mounted several cases against people or entities for things like alleged defamation or breach of contract, according to a check of the public hearing list on Wednesday.
Separately, Koh faces 15 charges and is due back in court in October for a criminal case disclosure conference.
The charges against her include:
- Conspiring with a doctor to make false representations to the Ministry of Health (MOH) that unvaccinated people had received a jab
- Instigating members of the Healing the Divide Channel Telegram group to “flood” the MOH quality service or feedback and Ministry of Social and Family Development of Singapore hotlines
- Instigating members of the same group chat to harass doctors at vaccination centres
- Organising a public assembly near Bedok Police Division HQ to resist the government’s COVID-19 vaccination programme
