Singapore to hang man over 2 lbs cannabis trafficking charge
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Singapore is set to execute a man on charges of conspiring to traffic 2.24 pounds of cannabis that he is not alleged to have directly handled, in the final step of a case that has put the spotlight back on the Southeast Asian city-state’s harsh stance toward a drug that has become decriminalized in much of the West.
Authorities connected Tangaraju s/o Suppiah, 46, to an attempted exchange of cannabis in September 2013 through a phone number that he denied having access to at the time. He was sentenced to hang in 2018, under Singapore’s near-mandatory death penalty policy for trafficking more than 1.1 pounds of cannabis. He will be hanged Wednesday unless a last-minute appeal to Singapore’s president for clemency is granted.
Tangaraju’s family and rights groups allege that his rights were not adequately protected, and have called on the government to immediately halt the execution. They allege that he was interrogated without legal counsel — Singapore does not require that people under questioning be provided immediate access to a lawyer — and denied requests for a Tamil-language interpreter. His conviction relied on phone records, but prosecutors were not able to recover his mobile phone for analysis, court documents show.
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Singapore’s Home Affairs Ministry did not directly respond to questions sent by The Washington Post. It pointed to a statement by its Central Narcotics Bureau, which said that capital punishment is “used only for the most serious crimes” as part of the city’s “comprehensive harm prevention strategy which targets both drug demand and supply.” It said that Tangaraju was “accorded full due process under the law” and called the assertion he had requested an interpreter “disingenuous.”
The planned execution has also been condemned by international opponents of capital punishment. Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, wrote in an email that Tangaraju’s treatment was “not good enough when the sentence is so totally final and irreversible,” adding that the execution was another attempt to demonstrate Singapore’s tough-on-drugs policy. British entrepreneur Richard Branson, who has publicly sparred with Singapore over capital punishment, called the decision “shocking” and “reminiscent of medieval times.”
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But that appears unlikely in Singapore, whose strict policy on drug crimes has made it an outlier among other similarly wealthy countries. Singapore executed at least 11 people for drug offenses in 2022, according to Harm Reduction International. The U.K.-based nonprofit, which advocates for treating drug addiction as a medical problem, said that Singapore is one of less than a dozen countries — including Yemen, Iran and Sudan — that has mandatory capital punishment for some drug offenses.
Tangaraju’s hanging will be the first known execution in Singapore since October, according to journalist Kirsten Han, who campaigns against capital punishment. The country’s use of the death penalty also came under international scrutiny last year, when an intellectually disabled Malaysian man was put to death for trafficking a small amount of heroin.
Han said in a statement that Singapore is out of sync with a world moving away from capital punishment and “uncompromising ‘war on drugs’ approaches that have disproportionately affected the most marginalized and minoritised in society.”
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“More than drugs, it is our drug policy that ruins lives in Singapore,” said Kokila Annamalai, an activist against capital punishment.
The Singaporean government, reportedly a leader in organizing international opposition against loosening drug restrictions, maintains its policies are successful in curbing narcotics use. It has also said that activists “glamorize the lives of drug traffickers, rather than focus on the lives of the victims.”
Many countries have moved to a harm-reduction approach to drug policy, said Mai Sato, who studies the death penalty at Australia’s Monash University, adding that the war on drugs has created what the United Nations has called a “lucrative and violent black market.”
“In this sense,” Mai said, states “that impose the death penalty for drug offenses are in fact part of the illicit drug market.”
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Source: The Washington Post
