officials Singapore approves two new executions for drug trafficking scheduled for this friday bringing the total to him at an unprecedented rate since March In recent years, it has received criticism from the UN, which has demanded the island stop executions.
One of the prisoners, whose name was Rahim, was executed in the early hours of Friday morning, had tried to delay the sentence the previous day, and had attended a lengthy hearing via videoconference in response to a historic complaint he had made against the island government and the Attorney General’s Office, and there were 22 prisoners sentenced to death. The anti-death penalty campaigners who represented them in the Singapore report later argued that the island was barring their access to justice because the fees charged to lawyers defending death row prisoners were so high that they stopped being involved.
According to Kirsten Han, coordinator of the NGO Transformative Justice Collective, after hours of deliberation until Friday morning, court ruled against the petition, declared “abuse” of the process, and Rahim had an hour to say goodbye to his family before he was hanged. Han added on his Twitter account that the family is currently at Changi Island Prison “to identify and collect the body,” while the identity of the other inmate scheduled to be executed this morning is unknown.
Judicial authorities confirmed two executions were planned early Friday on Thursday, but Singapore generally does not disclose details of the prisoners and often does not officially confirm them, based on information the convicts’ family shares with activists like Han.
Last Tuesday, two more inmates were executed for drug trafficking.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—hasn’t happened since at least 2010, and the annual trend has been down — about a dozen or less — since the high-hanging numbers. The 1990s, when they could exceed 70 per year. Since the end of March, Singapore has hanged ten prisoners for drug trafficking, and activists warn that more than fifty people have been sentenced to death as a result of the cessation of executions in the first two years of the covid pandemic. now causes executions to speed up.
The UN Human Rights Office has asked Singapore to stop the executions scheduled for this week and has imposed a moratorium on these executions. Home to skyscrapers and an excellent innovation lab, the modern Asian city-state has one of the most brutal anti-drug laws on the planet, considering the gallows to be enforced for smuggling more than 15 grams of heroin, 30 grams of cocaine. , 500 grams of marijuana and 250 grams of methamphetamine.