1. The Criminal Procedure (Miscellaneous Amendments) Act 2024 was passed in Parliament on 5 February 20241. The Act advances our criminal justice system and contains various amendments aimed at (i) protecting the public by strengthening our levers to tackle crime, including serious sexual crime, and (ii) enhancing transparency, fairness and coherence in our criminal court processes.
2. The amendments will be rolled out in phases, with six of these amendments coming into effect on 31 May 2024.
3. These six amendments include:
(a) Empowering the Police to search arrested persons at the point of arrest and remove dangerous items from the person. This enables the Police to prevent arrested persons from causing harm to themselves or others.
(b) Empowering the Police to order suspects of non-arrestable offences to provide their Unique Identification Number (UIN) (e.g. NRIC, FIN, birth certificate number). The Police may arrest a person who refuses to provide their name, residential address or UIN, or if the Police has reason to believe that the information given is false. This improves identity verification of suspects by the Police.
(c) Allowing the immediate release of persons suspected of committing non-arrestable offences who were arrested by the Police for not providing their UIN, name or residential address. The Police can release such arrested persons without bringing them to a police station, upon verification of the person’s particulars.
(d) Removing the requirement for the Police to physically go to the crime scene to investigate arrestable offences, given that crimes nowadays are not limited to the physical realm (e.g. cybercrimes).
(e) Updating the definition of “police station”, to remove references to defunct units and cover all police establishments (e.g. Neighbourhood Police Posts, Neighbourhood Police Centres).
(f) Clarifying that where the court decides that it does not need to hear oral arguments when deciding on a matter, it does not need to convene an oral hearing to deliver its decision to the parties.
4. The remaining amendments will come into force at a later stage.
