Asian Legal Review

The Philippines is known for training nurses and exporting them to all corners of the world, but now the nation finds itself short-handed just as its number of coronavirus infections and deaths skyrocket.The country’s death toll from Covid-19 has surged nearly fivefold since April 1 to 462, and the confirmed cases have tripled to 6,981. That’s despite President Rodrigo Duterte imposing a lockdown on the main island of Luzon until at least April 30.With more Filipinos becoming sick, the…

A 34-year-old man who breached his 14-day stay-home notice to have bak kut teh (pork rib soup) in public after returning from abroad last month was sentenced to six weeks in jail by a Singapore court on Thursday. Alan Tham Xiang Sheng became the first individual to be dealt with for an offence related to Covid-19. Five others have been similarly charged and their cases are still pending before the courts.Stay-home notices are issued to those returning from abroad to prevent the spread of…

Serving drinks at 30,000 feet and explaining the intricacies of the in-flight entertainment system were all in a day’s work for Singapore Airlines cabin crew until the coronavirus turned the world upside down.Now Geraldine Loo spends her days guiding commuters at the city’s train stations, while colleague Norazillah Zayadi is working shifts in a hospital.These are just some of the workers who have been redeployed in Singapore as Covid-19 brings some jobs to a standstill and creates surging…

A new hotline for victims of domestic violence in Japan that opened on Monday is “absolutely needed”, according to experts, as the economic and social impacts of the coronavirus crisis begin to deepen.Unveiled by Seiko Hashimoto, the minister for women’s empowerment, the free hotline is presently available from 9am to 9pm, but from April 29 it is planned to be a 24-hour service, with support available in a number of foreign languages – including Thai, Tagalog, Korean and Vietnamese – from May 1…

A visiting team of Chinese medical experts has been giving tips to Philippine front-line medical workers on how to beat the coronavirus.The team of 12 doctors and nurses, visiting the Philippines in the first exchange of its kind between the two countries, urged their counterparts at hospitals on the front line of the fight against the virus to learn from their experiences in Wuhan, the early epicentre of the outbreak.The team, headed by Dr Weng Shangeng, vice-president of The First Affiliated…

I stood at the curb with a group of 75 newly returned Thai citizens from Indonesia. After three hours of tedious processing at Suvarnabhumi Airport, they still wouldn’t let us leave. Officials posed with us for photographs as if we were celebrities.“Don’t worry,” one officer said through his surgical mask. “Just be patient.”We were grateful to be back in Thailand. Many had been stuck overseas, flights cancelled due to Covid-19 travel restrictions. We were finally going home. Or so we thought…

Indonesia announced its first Covid-19 case on March 2, more than a month after its neighbours Singapore and Malaysia reported their first infections, and subsequently, President Joko Widodo admitted that some information had been withheld from the public to avoid causing alarm. With Indonesia now having 6,760 infections and 590 deaths, the highest number of fatalities in Southeast Asia, there are worries about whether the health care sector can handle the expected continued surge in cases.
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For six years, Leo*, a 29-year old Filipino man, managed to keep the fact that he had been infected with HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) from his family.But that secret was exposed in the worst possible manner last month, when a traffic officer at a checkpoint in Manila, installed due to the coronavirus lockdown, shouted it out for all the world to hear.Like 50 million other people in the Philippines, Leo has been affected by the lockdown imposed by Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on…

When the Malaysian Movement Control Order (MCO) took effect on March 18, Cannie Leo scrambled to secure a S$800 (US$561) room in Woodlands with a friend, so that she could continue working for a construction firm in Singapore.Weeks later, Singapore announced that it was implementing its circuit breaker on April 7, which required all “non-essential” businesses to cease operations for a month.Leo’s employers asked her to take a month of unpaid leave, and the 27-year-old administrative assistant…

Temasek Holdings denied speculation that Chief Executive Officer Ho Ching makes S$100 million (US$70 million) a year.“This claim is false,” the Singapore state investor said in a rare statement addressing the pay of the top executive, who’s also Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s wife.“Furthermore, Ho Ching’s annual compensation is neither the highest within Temasek, nor is she amongst the top five highest-paid executives in Temasek.”Temasek manages a portfolio that’s valued at S$313 billion as…