The new civil procedure rules for the General Division of the High Court in Singapore, excluding the Singapore International Commercial Court - the Rules of Court 2021 - were gazetted on 1 December 2021, and will come into operation on 1 April 2022. This article examines the impact of the new civil justice regime on the Singapore courts’ approach to assuming jurisdiction over foreign-based defendants (the “service-out jurisdiction”). Prior to its publication, it had been anticipated that ROC 2021 would significantly alter the manner in which the service-out jurisdiction would be asserted. However, as this article highlights, under ROC 2021, and the accompanying Supreme Court Practice Directions 2021, the courts’ overall approach to exercising jurisdiction over defendants outside Singapore is destined to remain largely unaltered. In general terms, this outcome is to be welcomed, as it avoids the conceptual and practical problems that would have arisen had some of the more far-reaching reforms proposed when drafting ROC 2021 been, in fact, implemented.

One of the fundamental aspects of the defence of contributory negligence is that it_x000D_ is objective in nature. Thus, when assessing the question of whether a claimant's_x000D_ failure to take care of his own safety contributed to the damage which he suffered, the_x000D_ court asks what a reasonable claimantwould have done in the relevant circumstances._x000D_ The only universally accepted variation to this rule applies in the case of children, in_x000D_ relation to whom an age-appropriate albeit otherwise objective standard is imposed._x000D_ Other categories of claimants are generally judged by purely objective criteria - even_x000D_ where, as in the case of those with physical or mental disabilities, such criteria may_x000D_ be wholly unrealistic.

On 18 August 2015, Parliament passed the Human Biomedical Research Bill, which establishes two separate, but related, frameworks for the regulation of human biomedical_x000D_ research and tissue banking.2 The aim of these frameworks is “to protect research subjects and tissue donors, so that dealings are conducted in an ethical and responsible manner. The Minister of State for Health, in moving the Bill however, was careful to emphasise that the Ministry of Health's (“MOH") intention is to use the HBRA as an instrument “to ensure the safety and welfare of research subjects whilst not stifling sound, ethical research."