Death Penalty News

British consular incidents involving suspected ‘drug mules’ grew from 80 in 2023 to above 340 in 2025.  The number of British nationals detained overseas on drug trafficking charges has surged more than 4-fold over 3 years, official figures show, alongside a government warning that penalties include life imprisonment and the death sentence.  Consular incidents involving suspected "drug mules" grew from 80 in 2023 to above 340 in 2025, with at least 160 recorded so far this year.  Over 200 UK citizens are presently held in foreign custody for smuggling cannabis originating in Thailand. Around 60% of those caught since 2024 are aged between 16 and 30. 

PHNOM PENH: Cambodia has announced plans to ratify a key UN treaty that would permanently prohibit the reintroduction of the death penalty, reinforcing more than three decades of constitutional abolition. The announcement was made by Minister of Justice Koeut Rith during the Ninth World Congress Against the Death Penalty, held in Paris from June 30 to July 2. Rith reaffirmed the Royal Government’s commitment to ratifying the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), an international treaty aimed at the global abolition of capital punishment.

Countries across Southeast Asia are moving away from the use of capital punishment. But Singapore remains an outlier. From Vietnam to Malaysia and Indonesia, Southeast Asian governments are narrowing the use of the death penalty and edging, often cautiously, toward abolition.  At present, eight of the 11 Southeast Asian countries retain the death penalty. Only Cambodia, the Philippines and Timor-Leste have abolished it in law. But recent years have seen most of the retentionist states abide by de facto moratoriums on executions and pass new legislation so death is no longer the mandatory punishment for certain crimes.

China has executed another four members of a powerful Myanmar-based crime family that oversaw 41 pig butchering scam* compounds across Southeast Asia.   The executed individuals were members of the Bai family, a particularly powerful gang that ruled the Laukkai district and helped transform it into a hub for casinos, trafficking, scam compounds, and prostitution.  China’s Supreme People’s Court approved the executions after 21 members were charged with homicide, kidnapping, extortion, operating a fraudulent casino, organizing illegal border crossings, and forced prostitution. The court said the Bai family made over $4 billion across its enterprise and killed six Chinese citizens.

Today [Oct. 10] is the 21st World Day against the Death Penalty, and a pathway towards abolition of this cruel measure in the South East Asia is not unimaginable. I don’t pen these words in response to vast mobilizations against capital punishment sweeping the region. Quite the contrary. Regrettably, we’re far from achieving that level of awareness and mobilization. This is a region where championing human rights hasn’t historically been viewed as fashionable or commendable. Yet, there’s a genuine opportunity to ignite a substantive conversation about the death penalty.

The High People’s Court in Ho Chi Minh City last Friday rejected an appeal and upheld the death penalty against a 29-year-old woman for having illegally transported narcotics from Cambodia into Vietnam for 19 times. On February 27 last year, border guard officers at My Quy Tay Border Gate in Duc Hue District, Long An Province detected a bag containing 3,966 synthetic drug tablets weighing more than 1.5 kilograms, 997.32 grams of ketamine, and nearly 2 kilograms of methamphetamine on Nguyen Thanh Ngoc’s scooter when she was riding it from Cambodia to Vietnam, according to court documents. Ngoc, 29, admitted to officials that Duong Ngoc Huynh Nhu, 33, living in Ho Chi Minh City’s Binh Thanh District had paid her VND5 million ($215) to carry the said drugs from the Cambodian province of Svay Rieng to Duc Hue District and hand over them to Le Hoang Vu, 41, living in the city’s Phu Nhuan District. Ngoc was arrested at My Quy Tay Border Gate before she could deliver the drugs to Vu. The Long...

The People’s Court of the southwestern border province of Tay Ninh on August 7 handed a death penalty to a 40-year-old Singaporean man for drug trafficking. According to the indictment, Cher Wei Hon was caught in Loi Thuan commune, Ben Cau district, Tay Ninh province, on June 29, 2019, along with nearly 10kg of drugs, and 27-year-old driver Duong Hung Tam from Tan Bien ward, Tan Bien district, also Tay Ninh province. The Singaporean man confessed that he was hired by a woman named Quynh in Ho Chi Minh City to transport the drugs from Cambodia to Vietnam to get 500-1,000 USD for each trip. Cher said he had transported drugs from Cambodia to HCM City at the request of Quynh for about five times. Meanwhile, Tam denied any discussions with Cher about the drugs, saying he is only the driver of Quynh.  There is no evidence proving he is Cher’s accomplice. Source: vietnamnet.vn , Staff, August 8, 2020 ⚑ | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or...

The Ministry of Justice in cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are studying the case of a Cambodian woman who has recently been sentenced to death in Vietnam over drug trafficking if she could be extradited. Miech Srey Neang, 27, from Phnom Penh was convicted and sentenced to death on Friday by Tay Ninh Provincial People’s Court after being found guilty of trafficking drugs from Cambodia to Vietnam. She was accused of smuggling 5 bags of methamphetamine weighing about 5 kilogrammes. Chin Malin, a secretary of state and spokesman of the Ministry of Justice, told Khmer Times that Cambodian authorities have been aware of Srey Neang’s case. “The Ministry of Justice is working with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to gather detailed information regarding this case so that we will provide legal intervention,” he said. “Right now, we are studying the case, then we will decide how we could help her.” When asked if the government will request for her extraditi...

A HCMC court Monday sentenced a Vietnamese Australian woman to death for running a drug trafficking operation between Cambodia and neighboring Vietnam. Lam Kim Phung, 55, was arrested in late 2016 and identified as the leader of a gang that trafficked heroin and methamphetamine from Cambodia into Ho Chi Minh City. She was charged with "illegal trading of narcotic substances." 3 of her henchmen, including Le Quang Cuong, Nguyen Duy Thach Thao and Tran Quynh Linh, got death sentences for the same charge at the trial court. 3 others were given life sentences while four, including Phung’s brother, also a Vietnamese Australian citizen, were jailed between 3 years and 6 months to 20 years in connection with the drug ring. According to the indictment, Phung returned to Vietnam from Australia in 2005 and run restaurant and casino businesses in Cambodia. Due to business losses, she came up with idea of trafficking drugs. From July 2016, Phung bought drugs from C...

On Sunday, as he spoke at the offices of a local anti-human-trafficking NGO, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen raised the prospect of a national referendum on whether the death penalty should be reintroduced to punish people who rape children. Specifically, he seemed to be suggesting executions of people who rape family members. Despite capital punishment being made illegal in Cambodia in 1989 (making it something of an anomaly in Southeast Asia, where state-enforced murder is widely sanctioned)  local media reported that his idea was certainly popular among social media users. Yet the proposed constitutional change was criticized on Monday by some analysts and legal experts who asserted the country’s judicial system is not developed enough to cope with the death penalty, and the potentially high number of mistrials of justice, and that improved law enforcement is a far better solution to the problem. Others, though not quoted in the government-friendly media, claimed that gi...

The case of Muhammad Lukman Mohamad ignited outrage in August, when he received a death sentence in Malaysia for selling medicinal cannabis oil to cancer patients. Even the country's new prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, called for a review of the sentence the 29-year-old father received. Now, Mr. Mahathir's government is going 1 step further, eliminating the death penalty entirely. "All death penalty will be abolished. Full stop," the country's minister of law, Liew Vui Keong, told reporters this week. The government is also preparing to rescind the colonial-era Sedition Act, which was used by previous governments to silence critics and opposition politicians. Gobind Singh, the communications and multimedia minister, said on Thursday that use of the law should be suspended immediately, pending its repeal. "The decision was made by the cabinet yesterday that since we are going to abolish the Sedition Act, action under that act should be...

Malaysia has announced plans for a new bill that could abolish the death penalty within weeks and bring in a moratorium on executions effective immediately, a move that could save a Sydney grandmother currently facing execution for drug charges. The announcement was made on October 10, the World Day Against the Death Penalty, and the bill is scheduled to be tabled at the next parliamentary sitting that will begin on Monday. "All death penalty will be abolished. Full stop," Datuk Liew Vui Keong — minister in charge of law in the Prime Minister's Department — told media at an event at University of Malaya. Drug offences account for the largest number of executions in Malaysia, where current laws enforce mandatory capital punishment for crimes ranging from murder and kidnapping to drug offences and treason. Amnesty International reported in March that 799 people on death row were convicted of drug trafficking, including 416 foreign nationals. The aboli...

BANGKOK: The Appeal Court today upheld the death sentence for a Spanish man convicted of murdering and dismembering the body of a fellow Spaniard two years ago. Artur Segarra Princep, 38, was given the death penalty by the Criminal Court last year. He was convicted of the premeditated murder of David Bernat, 41, kidnapping, body concealment, torture and theft. He had entered pleas of not guilty. Segarra, 38, was taken to the courthouse from Bang Kwang Central Prison today today (July 13) to hear the Appeal Court's ruling.  The judges upheld the judgement of the Criminal Court. The court was told that between Jan 20 and Jan 26, 2016, Segarra forcibly kept his business friend Mr Bernat in a room at PG Condominium Rama IX in Huay Kwang district and tortured him into transferring B10 million into Segarra's bank account. Segarra withdrew about B700,000 in cash before killing him in the room. The victim’s body was frozen before Segarra dismembered the corps...

In July 2013, then-US president Barack Obama sat down with his Vietnamese counterpart, Truong Tan Sang, to talk about Thomas Jefferson. It was Jefferson, Sang said, who had inspired the words of Ho Chi Minh's Proclamation of Independence, which carried as its opener a passage of America's Declaration of Independence. Just 2 weeks after this high-minded discussion on autonomy and liberty, Vietnam executed a young man named Nguyen Anh Tuan. It was thought to have been one of the first executions in Vietnam since it changed to death by lethal injection years earlier. But because Vietnam was banned from purchasing "authorized" lethal drugs, Tuan was administered with a home-made concoction that reportedly took 2 hours to kill him. Between the month of Tuan's death, August 2011, and June 2016, Vietnam executed 439 people, according to one estimate by its Ministry of Public Security, which normally doesn't publish such lists. In early 2013, one co...