SINGAPORE - Creating a Constitution and laws that meet the specific needs and circumstances of a country is never a purely legal process, said Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong on Aug 12.

Instead, it demands a keen understanding of the society: its vulnerabilities, the likely problems, and solutions to these problems that have the best chance of working. This requires political experience and judgment, Lee said at the launch of a new book on three uniquely Singaporean laws.

The book, by former Cabinet minister and jurist S. Jayakumar, provides a ringside view of the creation of the elected presidency, the Group Representation Constituency (GRC) and the Non-Constituency MP (NCMP) schemes.

These three laws each had a clear purpose and made sense for Singapore’s context, Lee said at the event held at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The elected presidency was to protect the Republic’s past reserves and to safeguard the integrity of its public service, while GRCs were to ensure adequate representation of the minority races in the House. Meanwhile, the NCMP scheme ensured that opposition voices were never shut out of Parliament, he noted.

While all three laws were originally conceived by Mr Lee Kuan Yew at around the same time, they were mooted to Cabinet and discussed extensively, said Lee. There were many disagreements, and many possible models were suggested and discarded, he added.

“From conceptual idea to implemented scheme, the team revised their thinking quite significantly,” he noted. The Constitution was amended in 1984 to institutionalise the NCMP scheme, in 1988 for GRCs and in 1991 for the EP.

The laws were the work of practical men who governed Singapore, not scholars or philosophers, said Lee.

“They were acutely conscious of what made Singapore tick, where our faultlines were, and how very easily things could go wrong,” he said. “They were not chasing ideological purity or conceptual tidiness, but what worked, and would benefit Singapore.”