Telegraph.co.uk, 25 Jan 2009, Ben Bland
The executive director of APEC (the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation grouping) has insisted that there will be room for free speech at this year's annual summit in Singapore despite the government signaling that it will toughen its protest laws ahead of the meeting.
At a lunch organized by the Foreign Correspondents Association of Singapore, I asked Michael Tay, the genial Singaporean diplomat who is executive director of APEC, about the approach to managing protests at the November meeting.
He explained that while security would be paramount because of the presence of world leaders like Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin, "there will be room for people to speak". He suggested that there may be authorised protest areas, as there were for the controversial IMF/World Bank meeting in 2006.
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