Joshua ''Ben'' Jeyaretnam, who has died aged 82, was for many years Singapore's only political opposition, standing courageously for universal values of fairness and free speech against Lee Kuan Yew's ''Asian values'' of hierarchical order, public submissiveness and government by the fittest (that is himself, his son and his People's Action Party).
Jeyaretnam, as leader of the Workers' Party, was regularly persecuted, briefly imprisoned and ultimately bankrupted by colonial libel and contempt laws, but he continued his struggle to make Singapore a more open society.
Born into an Anglican family of Christian-Tamil descent in what was then Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), he was educated at St Andrew's school, Singapore, during the Japanese occupation and won, via a correspondence course, a place to study law at University College London.
There, a lecture by Nye Bevan inspired his early socialist beliefs.
They were put on hold while he developed a successful legal practice back in Singapore, where he became increasingly angered by the governing party's attacks on trade unions. So in 1971 he made his political move, joining the Workers' Party, which was at that time moribund through lack of effective leadership.
His first electoral attempts failed, but his mild criticisms of the Government infuriated Lee Kuan Yew, who in 1978 tried to crush him with a libel case.
In court, with the help of his wife, dying of cancer, and of John Mortimer, QC ,acting pro bono, Jeyaretnam survived albeit much poorer from the libel damages to fight another day.
That day came in 1981, when the electors in the constituency of Anson stood up to the governing party's threats to cut their public utilities and elected Jeyaretnam as Singapore's first opposition MP.
This victory was the trigger for a long-running campaign to destroy him.
He was forced to pay the Lee family and other party grandees for criticisms that would scarcely raise eyebrows in real democracies.
He was fined for contempt of Parliament for making allegations of the kind commonly made by MPs in other countries.
Jeyaretnam estimated he had paid out more than $S1.6 million in damages and costs.
His bankruptcies disqualified him from Parliament for several periods and no shops would stock his books: he was forced to sell them on street corners.
Ironically, it was the ruling party's obsession with destroying its opponents that led it to overplay its hand.
Not content with having him convicted, bankrupted and expelled from Parliament, the party's obsession with humiliating Jeyaretnam led it in 1987 to take away his right to practise law.
But it failed to notice an obscure clause in the Legal Practitioners Act that permitted an appeal by a debarred solicitor to the Privy Council in London.
It was there the whole trumped-up series of charges against Jeyaretnam unravelled.
The English law lords reviewed the case and voiced a devastating condemnation of the Singapore judges who had handled it, expressing ''deep disquiet that by a series of misjudgments''that Jeyaretnam and his co-accused had suffered a grievous injustice.
The Singaporean Government responded by abolishing all appeals to the Privy Council.
It still adamantly refuses to sign any human rights treaty that would permit any more decisions of its courts to be the subject of any appeal to an international tribunal.
But the Privy Council judgment in Jeyaretnam's case still resounds, as a warning to other judges tempted to fail in their task of standing up for the subject against the state.
For the past 40 years, Jeyaretnam pointed out Singapore's democratic deficit.
His speeches were not properly reported in The Straits Times.
Any foreign newspaper that interviewed him risked having its circulation cut to 400 copies.
Jeyaretnam felt that many Western criticisms of Singapore were misplaced. They focused on laws against jaywalking and urinating in public.
The real concern was the ruling party had turned the city state into an ersatz democracy by suppressing well-intentioned dissent, with the sole objective of maintaining its monopoly of power.
His views were set out in a book in 2003 by Chris Lydgate that serves as his biography, Lee's Law How Singapore Crushes Dissent.
The persecution Jeyaretnam stoically suffered gave his life a significance it would not otherwise have had.
The People's Action Party, which has ruled Singapore since 1965, still holds 82 of the 84 elected seats in Parliament.
Jeyaretnam lost his seat in 2001, bankrupt again because he could not pay another $367,000 libel judgment to Mr Lee and son.
But, on emerging from bankruptcy earlier this year, he helped to found the Reform Party and announced he would once again stand for Parliament, in an attempt to give Singapore ''rights that are most essential to our wellbeing: the right to speak up freely, the right to tell the Government that the way things are going is wrong''.
Jeyaretnam's wife, Margaret, whom he met when studying law in London, died in 1980.
He is survived by two sons Kenneth, an economist and Philip, a poet and president of the Law Society of Singapore.
The Privy Council's recommendation that the Singaporean Government make amends for his wrongful conviction has, of course, been ignored.
A future generation will understand that Jeyaretnam deserves not only to be pardoned but to be honoured. Guardian
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