Singapore says WSJ waging campaign against judges

By Melanie Lee

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Singapore's attorney general accused the Wall Street Journal of waging a campaign to tarnish the country's judiciary, but said he is not pushing for the harshest sentence in contempt proceedings against the newspaper.

Singapore's attorney general brought contempt proceedings against the publisher of the Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal and two of its editors earlier this month.

"I'm not here to punish the Wall Street Journal," Attorney-General Walter Woon told Reuters in an interview this week.

"This is not the first time they have accused our judges of being biased, they have done it twice before and this smacks to me of an ideological campaign," he said.

The Wall Street Journal, owned by News Corp's Dow Jones & Co, said in a statement earlier this month in response to the contempt proceedings that it does not believe the articles involved were contemptuous of the Singapore courts.

The Southeast Asian country's leaders have sued many foreign news organisations including the International Herald Tribune, the Economist and Bloomberg, many of whom paid thousands in fines or out-of-court settlements.

Singapore's leaders say the defamation lawsuits are necessary to protect the reputations of its political leaders but critics say the lawsuits are used to stifle dissent.

The world's largest legal association, the International Bar Association, released a report in July expressing concern over the independence of Singapore courts when it came to adjudicating lawsuits involving political figures.