The decision to hang a teenage drug dealer undermines progress and puts the island state back on the fringe.
On Friday, the Singapore court of appeals rejected a constitutional appeal that challenged the island-state's mandatory death penalty for drugs.
The case was brought by a young messenger named Yong Vui Kong (left) who was arrested for carrying 47 grams of heroin into Singapore when he was just 19 years old. Though he claims to have been ignorant of the contents of the package that he was hired to deliver from Malaysia, the decision makes it probable that he will die for his "crime".
On its own, this case is cause for despair. The state-sanctioned killing of a poor, vulnerable young man should attract outrage from all quarters. However, the decision is also disheartening to abolitionists of capital punishment who had started to believe there was a progressive moderation occurring in Singapore's application of the death penalty.
Throughout the 1990s and the early part of the last decade, Singapore had been widely seen as one of the most aggressive executioners in the world. It was believed to have had more executions per capita than anywhere else and the overwhelming majority of those sent to the gallows were drug offenders. According to Singapore's ministry of home affairs, of 138 executions carried out between 1999 and 2003, 110 were convicted of drug-related crimes. However, in its latest report on the death penalty, Amnesty International wrote: "The island state has significantly decreased its use of the death penalty in recent years." Only one person was known to have been executed in 2009 compared with 21 hangings in 2000, according to the organisation.
It has to be mentioned that the death penalty for drugs is a violation of international law no matter how infrequently it is carried out. There are numerous treaties and international guidelines that restrict the use of the death penalty and it has long been established by United Nations political bodies that drug offences should not be made capital crimes.
Nevertheless, there are 32 countries in the world that prescribe the death penalty for drugs, 13 of which make it a mandatory penalty for certain categories of narcotics crimes. However – even though the very existence of capital drug laws is at odds with international law – not all death penalty policies are equal in practice. Fewer than half of the 32 countries have executed any drug offenders in the last three years. Many of these countries – even those that make it a mandatory punishment – have gone more than a decade without executing anyone for any crimes. For example, Brunei Darussalam has a mandatory death penalty for drugs in law, but in practice it hasn't executed anyone since 1957. On the other hand, there is a very small group of countries on the fringe of death penalty policy that ferociously execute drug offenders, including China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and (until recently) Singapore.
However – at least as far as anyone knows since Singapore's death penalty statistics are not thoroughly reported – the country appeared to be softening. There were various theories, one of which posited that Singapore was stepping into line with the international trend of limiting the application of capital punishment.
For the last several years, Singapore appeared to be making strides with regard to bringing its death penalty policy into sync with the rest of the world.
However, the decision to retain the mandatory death penalty for drugs – to say nothing of its willingness to hang a drug offender arrested in his teens – clearly indicates that Singapore continues to exist on the fringe.
Source: The Guardian, May 18, 2010
