The authorities of the Asian country have applied the death penalty to 10 prisoners since March
the singapore authorities confirmed two new executions for drug trafficking scheduled for this Friday bring the total to ten since March, an unprecedented pace in the past years that has drawn criticism from the UN, which had asked the island to stop the executions.
One of the prisoners executed early Friday morning, identified as Rahim, had tried the day before to postpone the punishment, attending a long hearing by videoconference in response to a historic complaint against the island government and the Attorney General’s Office filed by him and 22 convicted prisoners to dead. Representing themselves, anti-death penalty campaigners in Singapore report, they argued that the island denies them access to justice, as fees levied on lawyers defending death row inmates in the later parts of the process are so high that they are discouraged from getting involved.
According to Kirsten Han, coordinator of the NGO Transformative Justice Collective, after hours of deliberation until early Friday morning, the court ruled against the petition, declaring it an “abuse” of the process, and Rahim had an hour to say goodbye to his family before he was hanged. Han adds, on his Twitter account, that the family is now at Changi Island Prison to “identify and collect the body”, while the identity of the other prisoner also scheduled for execution this morning is unknown.
Judicial authorities confirmed on Thursday that there were two executions scheduled for early Friday, but Singapore does not usually reveal details of the inmates and does not usually confirm them officially, depending on the information that the family of the convicts shares with activists like Han.
Last Tuesday, two other prisoners for drug trafficking had been executed., a 34-year-old Malaysian and a 46-year-old Singaporean. Han told EFE today that this rate of executions – all for drug trafficking so far this year – had not been experienced since at least 2010, and that the annual trend had been downward – around a dozen or less – since the high hanging figures from the 1990s, when they could exceed 70 a year. Since the end of March, Singapore has hanged ten prisoners for drug trafficking, and activists warn that there are still more than fifty on death row, saturated as a result of the halt in executions in the first two years of the covid pandemic. -19, now resulting in an acceleration of executions.
The UN Office for Human Rights had asked Singapore to stop the executions scheduled for this week, imposing a moratorium on these executions. The modern Asian city-state, home to skyscrapers and an innovation lab par excellence, has one of the most draconian anti-drug laws on the planet, contemplating the application of the gallows for trafficking more than 15 grams of heroin, 30 grams of cocaine, 500 grams of cannabis and 250 grams of methamphetamine.