Having watched the uploaded videos from the different witnesses over the past two weeks, I have several observations that I would like to share.

First, let me say that I am not making a comment on which version of events is true. I shall reserve any such comments until all of the witnesses have given their evidence before the COP.

But watching the videos I realised that the COP's procedure for inquiry into the truth of the events is flawed. This is because the witnesses only disclose documents after being examined.

Allow me to make a couple of points:

1) Disclosure of documents should always come before, and not after an examination of a witness

As with all court processes in common law jurisdictions, a court (which bears the responsibility of determining the truth on a balance of probabilities) will generally not allow a witness to be examined without first ensuring that all documents that the said witness wishes to produce in support of his/her version of events are disclosed.

This way, the evidence given by a witness will be tested against, amongst other things, the documents that have been produced by either side. This allows for any examination to be robust.

In the case of the COP's inquiry, many people are complaining that Edwin Tong was plainly driving a wedge into Pritam's narrative. This in my view is flawed because at least at the time of examining Pritam, the committee had only reviewed (mostly) rk's and her associates' emails and text messages. Thus, fundamentally any examination of witnesses with a different version of events will be flawed.

2) Edwin Tong's examination style of the witnesses

This brings me to my second point: that there are complaints about Edwin Tong's style of examination, ie with leading questions.

By way of procedure, I believe that Edwin Tong's style of leading the witnesses (especially obvious during Faisal Manap's and Pritam Singh's examination) is appropriate. It's worth noting that if Edwin Tong were to employ an open-ended question style of examination, the process would take far longer, with the committee having to dissect and pick out relevant information from the witnesses. Worse, the committee may even be faulted for making a finding which from the evidence is at best equivocal.

So a leading question examination style is appropriate. However, given that the witnesses were not able to produce documents which support his version of events prior to their examination, questions put to those witnesses were tested on the basis of the documents which have been produced thus far. In Pritam's case this was especially glaring.

3) The duration of the examination differed for different witnesses

Take Pritam's and RK's examination for example. The former lasted for about 9 hours whilst the examination of the latter was only about 2.5 hours.

This goes back to the main point: At the time of RK's examination, the committee did not have any documents whatsoever, not even documents produced by RK in support of her version of events. There was an instance where the Chairman even commented that during RK's examination the committee was brought to hear many allegations of which they had not known about before.

Therefore, not only was RK's examination ineffective in testing her evidence for the truth, the committee went ahead to examine the other witnesses against RK's version of events, which as discussed earlier is flawed. And this can be seen in the very lengthy and adversarial examination of Pritam.

Just some thoughts.