S’porean lawyer wins global award for parliamentary work, advocacy for groups like migrant workers

SINGAPORE – For two consecutive birthdays, lawyer Charmaine Yap spent most of the day hunched over a laptop poring over lines of legislation.

As legislative assistant to former Nee Soon GRC MP Louis Ng, she played a key role in drafting the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, one of Singapore’s rare laws tabled by backbenchers rather than the authorities.

The Act, which protects food donors from certain civil and criminal liabilities, subject to safeguards, had been years in the making. Ng first mooted the need for such legislation in Parliament in 2020, and the Bill was eventually introduced in July 2024 and passed unanimously the following month.

Yap’s parliamentary work and advocacy for vulnerable groups such as migrant workers and refugees earned her the International Bar Association’s Outstanding Young Lawyer of the Year Award on Oct 8.

The 32-year-old is the second Singaporean to receive the award, which recognises young lawyers for professional excellence and contributions to the legal profession and wider community. The first was lawyer Remy Choo, who won it in 2016.

The whole process of coming up with the food donation laws stood out to Yap as she reflected on her award, as it showed her that MPs and their teams could go beyond raising issues in Parliament to develop policy.

“There’s so much more space and tools that they can use to advance the work in Parliament,” she said, pointing to surveys, public consultations and discussions with civil servants that went into developing policy proposals.

For those two years, Yap cut her work weeks to four days at her then employer, law firm Drew & Napier, taking a 20% pay cut.

This gave her more time to draft the law, on top of her other duties as a legislative assistant, which included drafting speeches for Ng, who spoke on 269 Bills over his two terms in Parliament.

The hours spent studying legislation and preparing for parliamentary debates was demanding, but the alternative – letting legislation pass without proper scrutiny – was harder to accept. 

“I just felt that that’s the role of Parliament,” she said. “I would feel quite aggrieved if a legislation comes through Parliament and gets passed without any debate at all.”

Former deputy speaker of Parliament Charles Chong, who supported her nomination, highlighted in a letter the extra mile that Yap has gone in her advocacy work.

“Most lawyers in Singapore who do public interest work do so at the margins of a conventional career, a compromise Charmaine refused,” wrote Chong, a seven-term MP. They met in 2018 through non-governmental organisation ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights.

He added that Yap has shown that legal excellence and service to justice are not in tension, including through her advocacy for migrant workers, refugees, single parents and other vulnerable groups.

In Nee Soon, she organised activities for migrant cleaners, visited their families in Dhaka and wrote letters of support for visa applications to help some reunite with their wives or children in Singapore. 

Law Society of Singapore president Tan Cheng Han said Yap’s recognition on the world stage shows what the country’s young lawyers are capable of.

“We hope her achievement will inspire the new generation of Singapore lawyers to build careers of meaning and impact, and to treat access to justice as part of what it means to practise law,” he added.

More than drafting speeches

Yap’s foray into parliamentary work began in 2016 when she met Ng while interning at animal welfare group ACRES and urged the newly elected MP to speak up for migrant workers. 

Ng suggested that she join his legislative team to raise those issues from within Parliament – which she promptly did, and stayed till Ng retired from politics in 2025.

During the nine years, one of her key contributions was to help the public and civil society groups understand parliamentary processes and how to raise their concerns through questions and motions.

Behind all of what Ng raised in the House were hours of consultations and research by his legislative team, said Yap.

For the food donation act, they consulted hotels, restaurants, supermarkets, bakeries and food charities and the public. These engagements also show Singaporeans that they could help shape legislation, she added.

Yap, who returned to Singapore in June after completing a master’s degree in law at Columbia University, said she does not plan to take up another legislative assistant role.

She wants to find her own voice, she said. “I feel that I’ve done all that I can to push for those issues in another person’s voice in Parliament. I should be finding my own way of contributing.”

She has resumed volunteering with migrant worker advocacy group Transient Workers Count Too.

She is also examining more practical alternatives to transporting migrant workers on lorries and whether catered meals delivered to migrant workers comply with food-safety requirements.

She hopes to get illegal employment kickbacks – where employers collect money from migrant workers in exchange for jobs or continued employment – to be treated as seriously as corruption offences.

Yap researched the issue at Columbia and is seeking to publish her findings.

Under the Employment of Foreign Manpower Act, a person who collects employment kickbacks can be jailed for up to two years and fined $30,000, compared with five years’ jail and a $100,000 fine for a general corruption offence under the Prevention of Corruption Act.

But without the “convening power” of an MP’s office, she said she now has to find new ways to bring people together to effect change.

Still, her years working with Ng has taught her that change does not always require reaching the most senior decision-maker.

A fan of organisational charts, Yap frequently consulted the Singapore Government Directory to identify who was responsible for different decisions.

“What’s more helpful is to understand who the decision-makers are and what levels decisions are being made at, and try and figure out – if you want to change something – at what point of the process do you have to engage with,” she said.

Asked if she would consider joining politics having seen first-hand how it can achieve change, Yap said she had mulled over the possibility and did not rule it out.

For now, she wants to try to see through policy changes in the causes she cares about from outside Parliament.

“(But) anyone who wants to do work that involves policy change must seriously consider joining politics since it’s one way of changing things.”