Like Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah before his troops captured two Israeli soldiers and turned Lebanon into a conflagration, Far Eastern Economic Review editor Hugo Restall probably had no idea what he was starting when he interviewed often-sued and perpetually beleaguered Singapore opposition leader Chee Soon Juan in the Far Eastern Economic Review. The result was another form of asymmetrical warfare, the Review vs. Singapore.

The suit is significant because for the first time there could be a Singapore attempt to collect libel damages outside the city-state itself. That in turn could have far-reaching ramifications for press freedom in Hong Kong, where the Review is published.

The Far Eastern Economic Review, now a monthly magazine of commentary and opinion, is being sued by Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, the country’s founder, and his son, Lee Hsien Loong, the current prime minister, for unspecified damages in connection with the interview, which among other things contained stinging observations about Singapore, the Lees and other issues.

Almost immediately after the article ran, the government slapped controls not only on the Review, which circulates about 3,000 copies there, but on four more foreign media companies publishing there -- the others being the International Herald Tribune, the Financial Times, Newsweek and Time Magazine, requiring them to post a security deposit of S$200,000 and appoint a local agent authorized to accept service of any notice or legal process on behalf of the publisher in the event that the government decides to sue, as it often does if it feels itself slighted.

The Lees followed up that action with a lawsuit filed Aug. 22 against Restall and the magazine, alleging, for instance, that the elder Lee had been “gravely injured in his character and reputation and {had} been brought into public scandal, odium and contempt” by references to him in the article.

Restall refused comment on the case.

The Lee’s lawyers first sent a letter to Review Publishing on July 18, demanding that the Review remove the offending article from its website, apologize and pay unspecified damages by July 24. The Review responded by offering to post the letter on their website and to publish an interview with Lee Kuan Yew although the magazine refused to post the S$200,000 bond required by the government, which probably means the magazine’s next edition will not be allowed to circulate.

The plantiffs, however, charged that the Review was attempting to profit from the libel through the interview, which theoretically would give the magazine wider circulation than it normally enjoys.

No government official has ever lost a lawsuit in Singapore, and it is improbable that they would lose this one. The question now is whether the Lees and Singapore intend to carry their threat outside the city-state itself. The negligible amount of assets the Review holds in Singapore makes it unlikely that the Lees or Singapore could recoup significant damages within the country itself. Firewalls erected between sister companies mean that Dow Jones Corporation, which owns the publication, would probably be protected from any defamation judgment case as well.

In this case, the government could take advantage of a Commonwealth statute that allows for reciprocal enforcement of damages and ask the Hong Kong courts to order the Review to pay up.

Many critics say the plaintiffs would be laughed out of any country with a rational legal system. But in this case, it isn’t a libel suit that would be filed. It would simply be implementation of a treaty allowing mutual execution of damages.

It isn’t certain that the courts would automatically do that. A Singaporean judgment would first have to be registered in Hong Kong’s Court of First Instance, where it would be enforced like a local judgment. The Review would have the right to raise objections and set out reasons that the judgment shouldn’t be honored. And in that action lies serious concern for press freedom in Hong Kong.

“The worst case is if the Hong Kong court accepted the conclusion and sought to extract damages from the Review,” said David Plott, a former Review editor and current deputy director of Journalism and Media Studies at Hong Kong University. “The ability of the Singapore government to see its standards of press freedom spread to someplace else like Hong Kong would be doubly alarming.”

In fact, Plott said, given rising concerns about press freedom in China, where the government has increasingly gone after both domestic and foreign journalists for critical reporting, “the greatest irony would be if Singapore rather than China would end up the greatest threat to press freedom in Hong Kong.”

Singapore and the Lee family have long been famous for producing lawsuits against journalists, both foreign and domestic. The media watchdog organization Reporters Without Borders, ranks Singapore 140th out of 167 surveyed countries in terms of freedom of the press. The country has been kicking foreign journalists out for writing critical articles about the republic since the early 1970s.

The Singaporean media, largely government-linked corporations, treat the government with kid gloves.

The proclivity to hit foreign media organizations in their pocket, though, has not only paid dividends in Singapore, where foreign media based there have largely left the government alone. The concept has spread to other countries, including Thailand, where Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has filed a massive libel action against his most vocal critic, Sondhi Limtongkul, the media magnate who controls Manager Group. In Malaysia various political figures have used libel laws to bat down pesky journalists and in the Philippines, Jose Miguel Arroyo, the scandal-tarred husband of President Gloria Arroyo, has brought suit against six politicians, two publishers and 12 editors and writers and is threatening to sue three more journalists and, a congressman.

The practice is also catching on in China where, according to an exhaustive study of libel actions by Benjamin L. Liebman in the Harvard Law Review, cases are being brought “by local public officials, government and Communist Party entities, or corporations to punish and control the increasingly aggressive Chinese media. In these cases, courts serve as state institutions at the local, as opposed to central, level to restrict and retaliate against the media and to block central oversight.”

In other cases, Liebman found, “persons without power or party-state ties sue the media, which, despite widespread commercialization, virtually all continue to be linked to the Chinese Party-state. Many such cases are brought by ordinary persons against Communist Party mouthpiece newspapers. (These cases) thus represent a deployment of the courts by ordinary citizens against state entities. Empirical evidence from 223 defamation cases studied in this Article indicates that the media lose the overwhelming majority of cases on both tracks.”

In Singapore’s case, however, the controversy comes as the government is also embarrassing itself by refusing to allow any protests at the meeting of 16,000 delegates to the World Bank/International Monetary Fund annual conference. Instead of showing itself as a hospitable, modern city, Singapore has reneged on a pledge to the international financial organizations, exiling protesters to Batam, an Indonesian island across the Strait of Malacca from the city state. That earned the government a rebuke from the leaders of the two financial organizations. World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz called the government “authoritarian” and said that “a lot of damage has been done, and it’s self-inflicted.”

Ultimately, faced with pressure from the two organizations, the government had to back down in its effort to bar 27 representatives of foreign nongovernmental organizations from the conference. It let in 22 of them although protests have been muted at best in a heavily guarded city that pressed 10,000 law enforcement officials into service to guard the well-being of the delegates.