The court said the tapes and transcripts contained matters of national security.
“Their status as Mr Lee’s children does not exempt them from the operation of the OSA (Official Secrets Act),” Channel News Asia (CNA) reported the judges as saying.
Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon and judges Chao Hick Tin and Andrew Phang made up the three-man bench which heard the appeal.
The interviews with Kuan Yew, which took place between July 8, 1981 and July 5, 1982, while he was prime minister, were taped and transcribed by the government’s Oral History Unit.
Kuan Yew had signed an agreement governing the use of the tape recordings and transcripts, according to the CNA report.
After Kuan Yew died, in March 2015, the executors of his estate, Wei Ling and Hsien Yang, had applied to the High Court for rights to the transcripts.
In September 2016, the High Court dismissed their application on the grounds that the transcripts came under the OSA, on account of their politically sensitive nature.
Wei Ling and Hsien Yang then appealed the decision saying Kuan Yew had been allowed to keep a personal copy of the transcripts after he left public office. They also said some of the tapes contained recollections of his personal childhood, education and family life, which could not be covered by the OSA, according to the CNA report.
The Court of Appeal said it was “amply satisfied” that Kuan Yew’s personal right to use the transcripts did not pass to his estate.
“We have no doubt that Mr Lee was aware and indeed mindful of the existence and operation of the OSA.
“That being the case, Mr Lee could not have envisioned that his estate would be able to make use of the transcripts in the same way that he could,” the judges wrote.
According to the CNA report, the judges said their conclusions were “entirely consistent with Mr Lee’s desire to ensure that the information in the transcripts would be protected … because the interests at stake are not personal to Mr Lee but involve matters of national interest.
“Mr Lee gave the interviews not in his personal capacity, but in his capacity as the prime minister of Singapore, as part of a government project: This too militates against the notion of such rights being vested in his personal executors.”
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