Remembering M. Ravi: The lawyer who would not stop fighting

It took me some time to gather my thoughts after the sudden passing of M. Ravi in the early hours of Wednesday, 24 December 2025. Part of the shock came from how ordinary our last exchanges had felt. I had been in regular contact with Ravi ever since I had to leave Singapore at short notice three years ago, and we had spoken just days earlier about the outcome of the Law Society’s extraordinary general meeting (EGM) held on Monday. There was nothing in his tone that hinted at finality—only the familiar mix of intensity, interest, and the hard-earned resignation of someone who understood, better than most, how things work in Singapore. It is difficult to come to terms with his death precisely because, in his own way, he believed he was climbing out of the worst chapter of his life. Ravi had fallen—publicly, painfully, and repeatedly. He had paid heavy personal and professional costs. Yet even after being struck off, he remained, at heart, a lawyer: not in title, but in instinct and conviction. He still spoke in the language of rights and procedure. He still kept himself up to date on legal developments. He still dissected legal arguments. And he still tried to help those who had nowhere else to turn—with the clarity that his help should not come at the cost of his mental health. I first met M. Ravi through my work at The Online Citizen. Over the years, we worked together on and off—sometimes closely, sometimes at a distance—often shaped by the rhythms of his bipolar disorder and the periods where life, pressure, and relapse disrupted everything. Like many who knew him, I saw more than one Ravi: the fiercely principled advocate; the relentless campaigner; the man who could be generous, warm, and protective; and the man who could also be difficult, combustible, and self-destructive. If there is one thing I learned from being around him, it is this: the stress borne by a human rights lawyer in Singapore is not merely professional. In capital cases and constitutional challenges, the stakes are unusually high. The work is adversarial by design, but the environment can also be unforgiving—legally, institutionally, and socially. You are not simply arguing law; you are often arguing against public sentiment, state power, and a political culture that does not readily tolerate dissent framed as rights. Ravi chose that path anyway. And the reality is that, in Singapore, there are only a small number of lawyers who consistently take on public-interest cases at the sharp end of state power—especially when the death penalty is involved. Ravi, for all his flaws, was one of them. Over time, he also found himself not only fighting for clients, but repeatedly having to fend off steps aimed at him personally. One episode that stayed with him was the Attorney-General’s attempt to seek a personal costs order against him in a High Court matter involving two Malaysian death-row prisoners. The court dismissed the application. In doing so, Justice Valerie Thean queried whether a remark by an AGC representative—stating that the Attorney-General “reserved” his “rights against Mr M Ravi”—was discourteous. That incident mattered to Ravi not only because it involved him, but because of what it signalled to the wider Bar. In his own submissions, he argued that for courts to exercise effective supervisory jurisdiction over those who wield power, the threat of personal adverse costs orders against counsel should not be allowed to chill urgent litigation—particularly in death penalty cases, where the disposition of a party’s rights may be final in the truest sense. Another episode reinforced that point for him. After Gobi Avedian was taken off the death penalty, Ravi’s public comments about the Prosecution’s conduct became the subject of disciplinary proceedings, and the Attorney-General later pursued a High Court review application arising from those proceedings. Even where Ravi ultimately prevailed on that specific charge, the message to the Bar was unmistakable: in Singapore’s public-interest arena, a lawyer can find himself fighting on two fronts—one for the client, and another for his own professional survival. Whether one agrees with every legal move he made, the point he was making was broader: if you make it professionally hazardous for lawyers to act in time-sensitive public-interest matters, you shrink the already limited pool of advocates willing to step forward. He was not a human rights lawyer because it made him wealthy. He was a human rights lawyer because he could not accept certain outcomes as “normal”—not when a life was on the line, not when procedural finality was treated as moral closure, and not when the most marginalised were expected to disappear quietly into the machinery of the system. His work also extended beyond capital punishment. While it is less discussed today, Ravi was among the lawyers who took on cases involving LGBT persons and equality-related issues at a time when doing so came with professional and social costs. Many of those efforts were not widely understood or appreciated, but they mattered to the people who needed counsel willing to stand beside them. There was another choice that many people believed Ravi could have made, and at various points urged him to consider: leaving Singapore and applying for asylum. To those around him, he appeared to present a clear case. Yet he never seemed to seriously contemplate it. He never gave a straight answer—at least not to me—but the impression he gave was that he wanted to remain where he felt it was home, even if that home had become a place of pressure and persecution. Whatever the cost, Singapore was where his family resides, his friendships were, where his memories were, and where his sense of identity was anchored. And despite his hardships, there are episodes involving Ravi that will stay with me forever. I remember seeing Uncle Cheong—the father of Cheong Chun Yin—breaking down in tears in Ravi’s Chinatown office when Ravi delivered the news that his son’s death sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment. There was no triumph in that moment, only the raw collapse of a man whose son had lived under the shadow of the gallows and was finally allowed to breathe again. I also remember Gobi Avedian—saved from the death penalty after a final appeal succeeded when many believed there was nothing left to be done—standing in the accused’s dock at the Supreme Court behind a glass wall, thanking Ravi profusely for taking on a case others had written off. Ravi, in his own way, acknowledged the thanks and congratulated Gobi on his second chance at life. I was with Ravi when he met Gobi in Malaysia after his release, and I saw how Gobi and his wife thanked him again with renewed gratitude. Whatever anyone thinks of Ravi’s style or temperament, those moments remain difficult to dismiss. In the lives of the families involved, he was not an abstract symbol. He was the person who picked up the phone, filed the papers, and fought when hope had become an embarrassment. Ravi’s professional journey was complicated—by his conduct, by his illness, by disciplinary consequences, and by battles that sometimes spilled beyond the courtroom. He could be his own worst enemy. Yet even when he was no longer able to practise, he carried the profession in his identity. In his mind, being a lawyer was not reducible to a certificate; it was a duty to act when injustice appeared entrenched. And many people were drawn to Ravi precisely because of his reputation as a fierce defender—especially when a case carried public-interest weight. He rarely hesitated to step in, even when he was already overloaded, and there was often an unspoken expectation that he would do so on a pro bono basis. Over time, that dynamic took a toll. Piling more work and pressure onto him did not “help” him; it often enabled the very patterns that made his condition harder to manage, and contributed to relapses that derailed everything. When that happened, it was usually the friends around him who had to pick up the pieces—untangling debts, repairing damage, and dealing with the fallout—while some clients, unaware of his medical condition or indifferent to it, were left hurt, financially damaged and angry in ways that only deepened the spiral. In recent conversations, Ravi spoke about rebuilding. He knew there were long roads ahead—legal, personal, financial, and reputational. He sought to rebuild trust after regaining clarity following his disbarment, and to address his debts through structured repayment rather than bankruptcy—thankfully with the understanding of creditors who either wrote off what was owed or allowed the debt to be paid by instalments. He believed, firmly, in the idea of return: that a person could fall far and still stand up again; that the years ahead could still be shaped by purpose rather than by punishment; and that he could, one day, properly conclude the story he had been living. That is why I feel a grief that goes beyond the fact of death. I feel grief that Ravi did not get to finish what he saw as his journey—especially the goal of reclaiming, in some form, the professional life he had been proud of for decades. For Ravi, law was not simply employment; it was the central axis of his identity. In the days since his passing, there has been public commentary about the alleged involvement of drugs. Some supporters of the death penalty have seized on the insinuation and treated it as irony—almost as moral entertainment. That response is as crude as it is inaccurate.

Ravi’s opposition to the death penalty was never about excusing drug trafficking. It was about the moral and legal limits of state power. He rejected the claim that execution is a proven deterrent, warned about the irreversibility of mistakes, and argued that the law’s presumptions in drug cases risk undermining fair trial principles. In his view, society may punish severely—but it does not follow that it must kill.

If the death penalty truly stops drug trafficking, we would not still be having the same enforcement battles decade after decade. And if drugs are the supposed proof of deterrence, then the obvious question remains: how do drugs continue to circulate in a country known for some of the world’s harshest penalties? The deeper point—one far less convenient for armchair moralists—is mental health. Ravi was tormented by bipolar disorder. That illness cost him relationships and stability. It severed ties, distorted judgment, and magnified conflict. Yet mental illness is not a morality play, and it should not be treated as one. Singapore’s mental health system, despite incremental improvements, remains under immense strain. Capacity constraints, long waits, high costs—both the actual financial burden and the fear of it—and stigma still shape how people seek, or avoid, care. For high-stress individuals who feel perpetually cornered, the path of discipline and compliance is not always as simple as outsiders imagine. This is not an excuse for harmful conduct; it is an appeal for honesty about what it takes to endure prolonged pressure, public condemnation, and personal collapse while still trying to function. Ravi also lived with forms of social stigma that are easy to weaponise after a person is gone. In death as in life, he deserved basic dignity: to be remembered for the causes he took on, not reduced to insinuation about his private life. Ravi lived at the edge of that struggle. He could be extraordinarily lucid and principled, and he could also be unwell. He could act with courage, and he could also self-sabotage. He could help others with startling generosity, and he could also push away those closest to him. If you choose only one version of Ravi to remember, you will either romanticise him or demonise him. Both would be dishonest. The truth is more human and more difficult: it takes a particular kind of person to repeatedly stand up against the full weight of the system on behalf of people society would rather forget. That kind of person is rarely comfortable to be around. Often, they are not even safe for themselves. Ravi did what he believed he could do with the tools he had—his voice, his training, his courage, and, yes, his flaws. He fought cases few wanted. He spoke for people many preferred to silence. He insisted that procedure is not the same thing as justice, and that legality is not the same thing as morality. For that, Singapore is different—subtly, painfully, and undeniably. And for that, whatever else one thinks of him, M. Ravi deserves to be remembered not as a punchline, and not as a scandal, but as a man who tried—sometimes brilliantly, sometimes disastrously—to make things right. May he rest in peace. Edit: Added context to people who felt hurt and cheated by Ravi in the course of his work during his various bouts of relapses.