Thio Su Mien

Thio Su Mien (née Huang) is a Singaporean former legal academic and lawyer. She was the dean of the National University of Singapore's Faculty of Law from 1968 to 1971, the first woman to hold this position.

Education and career

Huang Su Mien was born to the Reverend Huang Yang Ying, the founding principal of the Anglican High School. She graduated from the Faculty of Law of the University of Malaya (now the National University of Singapore) in 1961, a member of the university's first batch of law graduates, and went on to teach at the faculty. In 1968, she was promoted to Vice-Dean and subsequently Dean of the faculty, making her the seventh dean of the faculty since its establishment in 1959. In 1971, she left academia to work in private practice.

In the 1980s, she became a partner at the Singaporean firm Drew and Napier. In 1998, she founded the law firm Thio Su Mien & Partners (now TSMP Law Corporation), which is now run by her son and daughter-in-law.

Political activities

In 2009, a group of conservative Christian women from the Church of Our Savior, under the leadership of Josie Lau and Thio, took over the executive council of the group alleging AWARE, a non-governmental organization in Singapore concerned with promoting gender equality. 6 of the 11 newly elected executive committee were church members who had only joined the group 3 months prior to the election, and 80 of the 120 attendees of the meeting were similarly new members from the church. The old guard called for a no-confidence vote and the new council was voted out of office on 2 May 2009. Of the 2,175 people who voted at the meeting, 1,414 voted for the no-confidence.

Deputy Prime minister Wong Kan Seng commented that "a group of conservative Christians, all attending the same church, which held strong views on homosexuality, had moved in and taken over AWARE because they disapproved of what AWARE had been doing", and called for tolerance, cautioning that religion and politics must be kept separate.

Personal life

Thio was married to Thio Gim Hock, former chairman of OUE Limited, until his death in 2020. She has three children, Thio Li-Ann, Thio Shen Yi and Thio Chi Ann (Rajah)

Thio is a Christian. In 2004, Thio reportedly blamed the 2003 SARS outbreak on Singapore's stance on abortion, and asserted that prayers seeking mercy and forgiveness allowed Singapore to avoid being affected by the 2004 Indian ocean earthquake and tsunami.

Selected publications

* ' he Presidential Council:Paper I' (1969) 1 Singapore Law Review 1: 2–8

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mien, Thio Su
Singaporean lawyers
Singaporean activists
Singaporean academic administrators
National University of Singapore deans
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)