Singapore | Anti-death penalty activist charged

Death penalty abolitionist and social justice activist Kokila Annamalai Parvathi was charged on April 23, over her refusal two-and-a-half years ago to comply with a government censorship order.

As previously reported by Green Left, Annamalai defied a directive under the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA), to issue a “correction” to an online post she and the Transformative Justice Collective (TJC) made about the 2024 execution of Azwan bin Bohari.

The post explained that Azwan had been on death row since 2019 after being arrested under the Misuse of Drugs Act four years earlier. It pointed out many inconsistencies and injustices in the way his execution had been handled by the state.

The POFMA grants ministers the power to order people to take down online content or post correction notices. People can also be pressured to issue an apology, so as to avoid defamation suits and other sanctions. Critics say the law is frequently used to silence dissent.

Annamali told GL at the time that the direction “required me to say that death row prisoners abuse the court process. We fight very hard for their right to bring cases — I’m not going to call these efforts an abuse of process.”

The POFMA direction also required Annamalai to say that the “Prosecution bears the legal burden of proving the case against an accused person beyond a reasonable doubt”, which is “a lie”, she said.

“It’s abhorrent that accused persons in capital cases have the burden to rebut the presumption that they were trafficking — there are at least six presumptions in the Misuse of Drugs Act and at least three that apply to capital offences.”

Source: greenleft.org.au, Staff, May 1, 2026

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde

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