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SINGAPORE \u2013\u00a0For two consecutive birthdays, lawyer Charmaine Yap spent most of the day hunched over a laptop poring over lines of legislation.<\/p>\n
As legislative assistant to former Nee Soon GRC MP Louis Ng, she played a key role in drafting the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, one of Singapore\u2019s rare laws<\/span><\/a> tabled by backbenchers rather than the authorities.<\/p>\n The Act, which protects food donors from certain civil and criminal liabilities, subject to safeguards, had been years in the making. Ng first mooted the need for such legislation in Parliament in 2020<\/span><\/a>, and the Bill was eventually introduced in July 2024 and passed unanimously the following month.<\/p>\n Yap\u2019s parliamentary work and advocacy for vulnerable groups such as migrant workers and refugees earned her the International Bar Association\u2019s Outstanding Young Lawyer of the Year Award on Oct 8.<\/p>\n The 32-year-old is the second Singaporean to receive the award, which recognises young lawyers for professional excellence and contributions to the legal profession and wider community. The first was lawyer Remy Choo, who won it in 2016.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n The whole process of coming up with the food donation laws stood out to Yap as she reflected on her award, as it showed her that MPs and their teams could go beyond raising issues in Parliament to develop policy.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s so much more space and tools that they can use to advance the work in Parliament,\u201d she said, pointing to surveys, public consultations and discussions with civil servants that went into developing policy proposals.<\/p>\n For those two years, Yap cut her work weeks to four days at her then employer, law firm Drew & Napier, taking a 20% pay cut.<\/p>\n This gave her more time to draft the law, on top of her other duties as a legislative assistant, which included drafting speeches for Ng, who spoke on 269 Bills over his two terms in Parliament.<\/p>\n The hours spent studying legislation and preparing for parliamentary debates was demanding, but the alternative \u2013 letting legislation pass without proper scrutiny \u2013 was harder to accept.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI just felt that that\u2019s the role of Parliament,\u201d she said. \u201cI would feel quite aggrieved if a legislation comes through Parliament and gets passed without any debate at all.\u201d<\/p>\n Former deputy speaker of Parliament Charles Chong, who supported her nomination, highlighted in a letter the extra mile that Yap has gone in her advocacy work.<\/p>\n \u201cMost lawyers in Singapore who do public interest work do so at the margins of a conventional career, a compromise Charmaine refused,\u201d wrote Chong, a seven-term MP. They met in 2018 through non-governmental organisation ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights.<\/p>\n He added that Yap has shown that legal excellence and service to justice are not in tension, including through her advocacy for migrant workers, refugees, single parents and other vulnerable groups.<\/p>\n In Nee Soon, she organised activities for migrant cleaners, visited their families in Dhaka and wrote letters of support for visa applications to help some reunite with their wives or children in Singapore.\u00a0<\/p>\n Law Society of Singapore president Tan Cheng Han said Yap\u2019s recognition on the world stage shows what the country\u2019s young lawyers are capable of.<\/p>\n \u201cWe hope her achievement will inspire the new generation of Singapore lawyers to build careers of meaning and impact, and to treat access to justice as part of what it means to practise law,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Yap\u2019s foray into parliamentary work began in 2016 when she met Ng while interning at animal welfare group ACRES and urged the newly elected MP to speak up for migrant workers.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ng suggested that she join his legislative team to raise those issues from within Parliament \u2013 which she promptly did, and stayed till Ng retired from politics in 2025.<\/p>\n During the nine years, one of her key contributions was to help the public and civil society groups understand parliamentary processes and how to raise their concerns through questions and motions.<\/p>\n Behind all of what Ng raised in the House were hours of consultations and research by his legislative team, said Yap.<\/p>\n For the food donation act, they consulted hotels, restaurants, supermarkets, bakeries and food charities and the public. These engagements also show Singaporeans that they could help shape legislation, she added.<\/p>\n Yap, who returned to Singapore in June after completing a master\u2019s degree in law at Columbia University, said she does not plan to take up another legislative assistant role.<\/p>\n She wants to find her own voice, she said. \u201cI feel that I\u2019ve done all that I can to push for those issues in another person\u2019s voice in Parliament. I should be finding my own way of contributing.\u201d<\/p>\n She has resumed volunteering with migrant worker advocacy group Transient Workers Count Too.<\/p>\n She is also examining more practical alternatives to transporting migrant workers on lorries and whether catered meals delivered to migrant workers comply with food-safety requirements.<\/p>\n She hopes to get illegal employment kickbacks \u2013 where employers collect money from migrant workers in exchange for jobs or continued employment \u2013 to be treated as seriously as corruption offences.<\/p>\n Yap researched the issue at Columbia and is seeking to publish her findings.<\/p>\n Under the Employment of Foreign Manpower Act, a person who collects employment kickbacks can be jailed for up to two years and fined $30,000, compared with five years\u2019 jail and a $100,000 fine for a general corruption offence under the Prevention of Corruption Act.<\/p>\n But without the \u201cconvening power\u201d of an MP\u2019s office, she said she now has to find new ways to bring people together to effect change.<\/p>\n Still, her years working with Ng has taught her that change does not always require reaching the most senior decision-maker.<\/p>\n A fan of organisational charts, Yap frequently consulted the Singapore Government Directory to identify who was responsible for different decisions.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s more helpful is to understand who the decision-makers are and what levels decisions are being made at, and try and figure out \u2013 if you want to change something \u2013 at what point of the process do you have to engage with,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Asked if she would consider joining politics having seen first-hand how it can achieve change, Yap said she had mulled over the possibility and did not rule it out.<\/p>\n For now, she wants to try to see through policy changes in the causes she cares about from outside Parliament.<\/p>\n \u201c(But) anyone who wants to do work that involves policy change must seriously consider joining politics since it\u2019s one way of changing things.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n SINGAPORE \u2013\u00a0For two consecutive birthdays, lawyer Charmaine Yap spent most of the day hunched over a laptop poring over lines of legislation. As legislative assistant…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":91806,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2611],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-buzz-headlines","wpcat-2611-id"],"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=91805"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91805\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/91806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=91805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=91805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=91805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}More than drafting speeches<\/h2>\n
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