Former Singapore human rights lawyer M Ravi dies at 56.

The legal and human rights community in Singapore is in mourning following the death of M Ravi, a former lawyer whose career was defined by a fierce, often solitary, commitment to defending the marginalized. He was 56.Friends confirmed his passing on Wednesday, a development met with a profound silence from official channels regarding the cause. Police, in a sterile statement, noted they were alerted to an “unnatural death” at Tan Tock Seng Hospital early that morning, where a 56-year-old man—identified by those who knew him as Ravi—had been admitted unconscious and pronounced dead.Preliminary investigations, they added, suggested no foul play, a procedural footnote that does little to quiet the echoing questions about the pressures faced by those who challenge the status quo. Ravi’s story is not merely one of legal obituaries; it is a stark narrative about the personal cost of advocacy in a system that prizes order above all.For over two decades, he was a singular figure, taking on cases many shunned: defending death row inmates, championing LGBTQ+ rights, and challenging mandatory death penalty laws with a tenacity that made him both a beacon for activists and a perennial thorn in the side of the establishment. His work was largely pro bono, a deliberate choice that spoke to a deeper philosophy, yet it came at a steep personal price.In recent years, he had been open about his struggles with bipolar disorder, a condition exacerbated, by his own account, by the relentless stress of his legal battles and the disciplinary actions that followed. The Law Society had suspended him multiple times, the last being a five-year suspension in 2023 for misconduct, a move his supporters decried as a strategic silencing of a vocal critic.To understand Ravi’s impact is to look beyond the courtroom dockets. He operated in a sociopolitical environment where the space for dissent is meticulously circumscribed, where the famous ‘Singapore model’ of development trades certain political freedoms for economic prosperity and stability.In this context, a lawyer like Ravi, who consistently invoked international human rights law and framed his arguments as moral imperatives, was an anomaly. He forced uncomfortable public conversations about capital punishment, mental health, and discrimination, often using his own life as a testament to the fraying line between resilience and breakdown.His passing leaves a vacuum. Who will now take up the causes of those on society’s fringes with such uncompromising fervor? The conversation now inevitably turns to the well-being of advocates themselves—the lack of systemic support for those who wage exhausting, often thankless, wars of principle.

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