Southeast Asia’s death penalty laws

A recent article discusses the ongoing impact of Asia’s death penalty laws.

The article reports that Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore have embraced the death penalty for years as a key tenet of the war on drugs.

Malaysia recently, abolished the mandatory death penalty and more than 800 death sentences have been commuted to imprisonment in Malaysia. It’s a positive development, encouraging Malaysian abolitionists to work towards the end of capital punishment altogether.

In Singapore, there are no signs of the government distancing itself from the death penalty. Nine men have been hanged in the city mainly for drug offences. The minister for home affairs and law said in a ministerial statement in parliament:

“In this war, we will have to decide: do we want to go soft, and risk ending up like the countries I have spoken about earlier? Do we want to become a ‘narco-state’, or an ‘infamous brown town’, or a hotbed for drugs and violence?”

It is expected that the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) will once again vote on a resolution on a moratorium on the use of the death penalty.

You can read the complete statement here