KUALA LUMPUR — Malaysian human rights lawyer Fadiah Nadwa Fikri said she has been banned from entering Singapore.
The alumna of the National University of Singapore (NUS) who recently completed her PhD posted on X that Singapore immigration did not explain the reason for the ban.
“I’ve been banned from entering Singapore and was just deported to Malaysia. I asked immigration to provide the grounds for the ban/deportation, but they said they could not disclose them.
“It’s stunning (because) I stayed there for 5 years and was conferred a doctoral degree on 31 January,” she said on the social media platform last night.
Fadiah has been a member of Malaysian legal rights advocacy group, Lawyers for Liberty (LFL), and the Center to Combat Corruption and Cronyism (C4).
She herself did not explicitly state why she thought she was banned from entering the republic, but reposted other tweets that expressed support for her, particularly her advocacy for Palestine and de-colonisation.
One of them was by @omyhangu who posted, “No one should be deported or lose their immigration status for speaking out for Palestinians against the Zionist genocide!!!”
Another post Fadiah reposted was by @farwasial, which said, “Singapore is threatened by a young academic @FadiahNadwa for speaking/organising against the #Palestiniangenocide. As Fadiah shows us this is part of the long history of imperial violence in Malaya.”
Some X users commenting on Fadiah’s post about her ban said she was “not welcome” to express such “high risk” views in Singapore which had the right to ban her, and to “practice your freedom elsewhere”.
On Reddit, however, a user highlighted the fact that LFL in 2020 had sued Singapore’s Minister of Home Affairs K Shanmugam in relation to allegations of brutal execution methods in Changi prison.
This prompted other users to speculate that Fadiah’s ban from entering the city state was probably for more than just her political views.
On the NUS website about its PhD students, Fadiah is recorded as having joined the university’s 2020 intake for Southeast Asian Studies.
NUS’ academia page also describes her work as examining decolonisation, Malay radical politics and racialising by British colonials in Malaya and Singapore.
In October last year, Fadiah participated in an anti-Trump rally and was quoted in Malaysian media speaking out against US President Donald Trump’s visit to Malaysia.
In 2018, she was investigated over an allegedly seditious article she wrote, “Don’t kiss the hand that beat you”. In 2020, she was questioned by police over a demonstration against then Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin’s government. – March 23, 2026