Chan Seng Onn

Chan Seng Onn is a Singaporean judge who presently serves as a Senior Judge of the High Court of Singapore. Formerly a prosecutor, Chan had previously served as a High Court judge from 2007 to 2022.

Early life and education Chan Seng Onn was born in Singapore on 4 January 1954 as the youngest of three children, with two sisters. His mother was a housewife and his father worked as a sewage pump attendant. He studied at St Anthony's Boys' School and then St Joseph's Institution (SJI) where he did his GCE O-Level and A-Level exams. He was a top student alongside future politicians Teo Chee Hean and George Yeo at SJI.

As a President's and Colombo Plan scholar, he graduated with a bachelor's degree in engineering from University College London in 1976.

Tenure as judicial commissioner On 15 October 1997, he was appointed Judicial Commissioner. As for Too's accomplices, one of them (Ng Chek Siong) was caught in May 1998 and sentenced three months later to eight years' jail with ten strokes of the cane, while the other accomplice (Lee Chez Kee), whom Too claimed was the main offender responsible for the murder, was arrested in February 2006 and likewise executed for murder.

In April 2000, Chan heard the case of 33-year-old Vincent Lee Chuan Leong, one of the three kidnappers and mastermind of the abduction of a 14-year-old girl for ransom in September 1999. Chan, in his judgement, noted Lee have no criminal records, and during the course of the kidnapping, he did not harm the girl and treated her well save for the trauma the victim gone through, and thus he decided that the death penalty was inappropriate, and instead sentenced Lee to life imprisonment. Subsequently, the other two kidnappers Shi Song Jing and Zhou Jian Guang, who were illegal immigrants from China, were also sentenced to life in prison by another judge Tay Yong Kwang during a separate trial.

Tenure as Solicitor-General and judge In June 2001, Chan returned to AGC as Solicitor-General. In that same year, he was appointed Senior Counsel.

Chan was also the judge who sentenced Ipoh-born Malaysian Nagaenthran K. Dharmalingam to death after finding him guilty of drug trafficking. Nagaenthran was originally set to be hanged on 10 November 2021 after serving 11 years on death row. However, a day before his scheduled hanging, Nagaenthran was discovered to be infected with COVID-19 and thus his execution was suspended, with the courts allowing him time to recover and Nagaenthran himself had also appealed to reduce his sentence. The appeal was dismissed on 29 March 2022, and he was executed on 27 April 2022.

Chan was also the presiding judge during the trial of Azuar Ahamad, a logistics executive who was charged with sexually assaulting 22 women after befriending them and drugging them. Agreeing with the prosecutors’ description of Azuar as “Singapore’s worst serial rapist”, Chan admonished Azuar for his remorseless behavior and pointing out that the offender had committed the sexual crimes with a high level of premeditation, and also cited Azuar having said numerous lies to distance himself from the fact that he drugged the women and took advantage of them. Labelling Azuar as a menace to society and noting his high possibility to reoffend, Chan sentenced 44-year-old Azuar to a years’ imprisonment and 24 strokes of the cane.

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