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Death penalty for drugs: Will 2022 signal sea change in ASEAN?
Southeast Asian countries lead the world in their combined number of dealth penalties handed down for drug offences, while the ASEAN human rights body continues to maintain its silence on the issue.
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People hold signs at a protest against the death penalty on April 3, 2022 at Speakers' Corner in Singapore. (AFP/Roslan Rahman)
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n March 30, Singapore executed Abdul Kahar bin Othman, a local man sentenced to death for drug offenses and the first person to be executed in Singapore in since 2019. Othman had been unable to appeal his execution because he did not have a lawyer.
Eight of the 35 countries that still retain the death penalty for drug offenses are in Southeast Asia and were responsible for a staggering 91.5 percent of all confirmed death sentences given for drug offenses worldwide, according to the Global Review 2021 from Harm Reduction International (HRI).
The imposition of these death sentences is shrouded in secrecy and characterized by widespread human rights violations (HRI 2019), such as lack of access to legal representation (HRI 2020), as in Othman’s case. Too often, there are reports of torture, ill treatment and coerced confession.
The situation is particularly dire for foreign nationals who find themselves sentenced to death outside of their home countries, often without interpreters and lawyers made available to them during the legal process, says a March 2019 HRI briefing paper.
In Indonesia, all 14 convicted drug offenders who were executed in 2015 and 2016 were foreign nationals.
Obviously, 2021 was not the first year in which death sentences in Southeast Asian countries comprised the overwhelming majority of death sentences for drug offences around the world. The HRI’s Global Overview 2020 shows that 98 percent of confirmed global death sentences for drugs, or 209 out of 213 sentences, were delivered in Southeast Asian countries: 79 in Vietnam, 77 in Indonesia, 25 in Malaysia, 13 in Laos, eight in Thailand and six in Singapore. The figure presented in the 2019 HRI briefing paper is similar, with 170 out of 180 confirmed death sentences, or 94.4 percent.
The percentage of drug convicts on death row is alarming: 98 percent in Laos, 66 percent in Indonesia, 67.8 percent in Malaysia, 55 percent in Singapore, 63.5 percent in Thailand and 50 percent in Brunei Darussalam. By 2021, a total of 1,633 people were on death row for drug offenses in the region, although the figure in Vietnam remains unknown.
