Source : The Straits Times, Mar 20, 2008
I REFER to Monday’s letter, ‘En bloc sales eroding our ’sense of kampung’, in which Ms Susan Prior has stated that minority owners have to fight desperately to keep their homes. She has also said that in Singapore, your home is not really your home and can be taken from you by your neighbours.
Article 12(1) of the Singapore Constitution states that all persons are equal before the law and entitled to the equal protection of the law.
The right to acquire, hold and dispose of property is enshrined in the Constitution. ‘To acquire’ means to become the owner. Unless there is a transfer of property to another or vesting and divesting of property , there cannot be said to be any acquisition of property . The acquisition must be through legal means. An usurper of another’s property cannot justify his acquisition in law and is not protected either by Article 9, which protects liberty, or Article 12.
The term ‘to hold’ means to possess the property and enjoy the benefits which are ordinarily attached to the ownership, including its management. Your neighbour should not be able to sell your property which you have acquired. ‘To dispose’ means to transfer, assign or sell the property . The power to dispose of a property follows from the power to hold property .
The power to acquire, hold and dispose property is a ‘liberty’ that is protected by law.
If Article 12 (2) does not restrict the State from imposing unreasonable restrictions on the enjoyment of property , it would reduce the protection offered by the Constitution against an abuse of power by the State against a citizen’s rights that are protected by the Constitution.
The word property in Article 12 (2) may not cover a mere contractual right for which a proper action is a suit for damages. Ms Prior’s fears that her home is not really her home and can be taken from her by her neighbours may not be strictly accurate.
K.S. Rajah
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Poser Over Homes With 99-Year Lease
Source : The Straits Times, Mar 29, 2008
MR K.S. RAJAH’S letter, ‘Right to hold property guaranteed by law’ (March 20), rebuts Ms Susan Prior’s comment in an earlier letter, ‘En bloc sales eroding our sense of kampung’ (March 17), that ‘your home is not really your home’.
Mr Rajah’s interpretation that ‘the right to acquire, hold and dispose of property is enshrined in the Constitution…’ may well be correct in the case of properties that are freehold, or even 999-year leasehold. But can the same be said to apply where leases are of only 99-year tenure, straddling barely a couple of generations, as is typical of public housing and many private estates, like the one where I am residing, with a quarter of the lease already run out?
Seen in this latter context, anybody who has made payment on such a leasehold property can be said to have not much more than what used at one time to be known as ’squatting rights’, and would be liable to eviction when the lease expires. In the very early 1950’s, the 100-year lease to the site of where Malayan Banking presently stands in Battery Road was on the point of expiry, and failed to attract a bid when put up for auction owing to the uncertainty of an extension by the authorities. This is the likely scenario when these 99-year leases also wind down. Ms Prior may therefore not be altogether wrong to think, and feel, that ‘your home is not really your home’.
Narayana Narayana
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