Crime and Capital Punishment: A Look at Southeast Asia

Given monikers like “Dirty Harry” and “The Punisher”, the newly-elected Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is known for his incendiary remarks and his tough stance against crime. One of the first pledges he made after winning the election was to bring back the death penalty for criminals. Amnesty International has noted that 58 countries today officially retain the death penalty, and of the 7 states that the International Harm Reduction Association of classified as being “high-commitment”, four of them are located in Southeast Asia. Though the total amount of executions are negligible compared to countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, the practice of capital punishment in Southeast Asia is as controversial as other high-commitment states because of its application to drug enforcement laws. Article 6(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states that the death penalty is to be carried for perpetrators of the ‘most serious crimes’, with the UN Human Rights Committee and the UN Special Rapporteur clarifying this to exclude drug offences. However, countries such as Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia are unrelenting in their application of the death penalty on drug-related crimes, interpreting the classification of ‘serious crimes’ to encompass drug trafficking.

There has been a move towards abolition, or at the very least, more measures are being put in place to ensure that capital punishment is reserved for the severest of drug crimes. In Malaysia and Singapore, it must be acknowledged that compared to the 1970s-1980s when the death penalty was introduced to combat high drug abuse rates, the authorities have been more conservative in meting out capital punishment in recent years. 

Yet despite the gradual move away from capital punishment, there are indications that more could be done to rethink drug enforcement policies in these countries. In 1985, Malaysia’s Inspector-General of Police reports that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent of crime, yet no action has been taken to rectify the situation. In 2013, Singapore introduced amendments that allows drug couriers a lighter sentence should they divulge useful information about drug rings. While it has been a monumental step towards a more equitable administration of justice, the issuance of the Certificate of Cooperation also uncomfortably bases a person’s right to life upon the extent of his “usefulness” to police investigation. There is the case of Muhammad Ridzuan bn Md Ali who cooperated with the police, giving information that he knew, yet who still found himself on death row.  Indonesia found itself the centre of unwanted media attention in the wake of its controversial decision to execute all but one member of the Bali Nine group. Its refusal to commute the groups’ sentences to life imprisonment to have led to larger diplomatic ramifications, as Australia, whose nationals are the ringleaders of the group, withdrewits ambassadors from Indonesia.

Various humanitarian organizations and even international anti-crime organizations have systematically condemned the practice of capital punishment in retentionist countries, but the latter have defended its use by declaring it as a matter of sovereignty of the state. Organizations such as Amnesty International and even other nation-states may appear to be encroaching upon the rights of individual, sovereign governments to determine policies that the latter deem to be the best solution to the war on drug. Michael Teo, a Singaporean high commissioner in the UK, defends the state’s use of capital punishment by asserting that drug traffickers are a ‘major part of the problem on the supply side’. In fact, Teo says, the government is doing all they can to provide help for drug abusers to ‘return to society with useful skills’, and that the needs of the individuals must be weighed against the needs of the wider society.

Teo’s language subtly reveals a collectivistic culture in which the needs of the many outweigh the rights of the few. Professor E. J. Mishan ("The Economics of Capital Punishment", 1989) shares the same thought. Though he bases his article on the debate of capital punishment for murderers in the UK, he asserts that it is safer, better, less risky for the wider population if the state executes convicts who may or may not turn out to be innocent. Between choosing to risk the many certainly innocent lives and choosing to risk only a few convicts who may turn out to be innocent, he deems it better to choose the latter option.

Ultimately, the Southeast Asian retentionist governments are desirous of acting in accordance to what they deem are in the best interests of the country as a whole. Considering their proximity to the Golden Triangle of opium production, a heavy-handed public front must be adopted to eliminate any chances of drug trafficking gaining a foothold in these countries. Such special circumstances also serve as a moral buffer that prevents the governments sympathising with the objections of human rights lobbyists, especially those in the West who may be perceived as being ignorant of the very tangible risk of drug trafficking in Southeast Asia. It may also seem that the harsh stance on drug trafficking are effective. In a UNODC conference paper, the drug trafficking routes in Southeast Asia notably exclude the three countries that impose the death penalty, with the exception of Port Klang in Malaysia.

Raw figures in these countries show an increase in reported cases of drug abuse, however. The official Drug Situation Report released by the Central Narcotics Bureau in Singapore reveals that the number of arrests of drug abusers increased by 6% to a total of 3,338. The National Anti-drug Agency in Malaysia reports that the country witnessed a steady decline in the number of drug abusers since 2010 before it started making a climb to about 21,777 people in 2014. The Indonesian Ministry of Health also reported that the proportion of drug abusers in the wider population has increased from 1.9% in 2008 to 2.2% in 2011.

The upwards trend in the number of drug abuse cases interrogates the effectiveness of death penalty. Yet the higher numbers of drug abusers could also mean that authorities are more effective in detecting drug crimes and identifying abusers, thus making the death penalty a successful instrument in the war against drugs. The numbers of drug crime rates are usually presented in ways that affirm or negate the case for the death penalty according to the different stances of a certain organization and scholar, thus rendering the measurement of success of the death penalty inconclusive. If anything, the differing interpretations of the data signify the impossibility of drawing a causal link between the death penalty and drug-related crimes.

Moving beyond the purely quantitative measurements of the success of drug-related crimes, however, humanitarian groups are questioning the “quality” of arrests of drug-related offenders. IHRA asserts that many of the people killed for drug-related crimes are merely ‘low level couriers, duped, or coerced into carrying drugs across international borders’. One such case is Mary Jane Veloso, a Filipino migrant worker implicated in the Bali Nine smuggle attempt, who insists that she was tricked into carrying the drugs.

The fact that many of those are executed are drug couriers instead of traffickers hints that while the symptoms of drug-crimes are dealt with, the root problem remains. In addition, while police forces make it a point to glean information from drug couriers about their links to their suppliers and larger drug rings, it is not known whether the authorities are actively seeking out a psychological and deeper understanding of drug couriers, which may be invaluable to piecing together - and thereby, disarming - the manoeuvres of drug syndicates, especially in their recruitment of drug couriers.

More than that, the imposition of the death penalty can in fact prove to be an impediment to transnational efforts in tackling drug crimes. In its Global Overview 2015, IHRA argues differing attitudes towards capital punishment can prove fractious in discussions amongst countries about best strategies in reducing drug crimes. On a larger scale, if one country were to execute nationals of another country, the relations between the two states would become strained to the point of damaging the possibility of a united front, which has enormous repercussions on overall policy-making, information-sharing, and resource-pooling. The IHRA rightly points out that the ‘international drug control system is not limited to a single actor’ and that ‘[f]unds, trainings, supplies and information all move efficiently across borders and legal contexts’. With drug crimes being investigated and prosecuted on an international level, Southeast Asian countries can no longer stay in isolation and justify the use of capital punishment by defending it as a matter of their sovereignty as a nation-state.  

To think that one nation’s decision on capital punishment can be made without it having wider-reaching ramifications is a false perception. In a world where it is becoming increasingly easy for crimes to be committed across borders, a global effort is needed to ensure that overall peace and security are achieved, and a common vision of how this is to be done must be agreed upon. It is as Michael Teo says, “Every society strikes its own balance between the rights of the individual and the rights of society”. Teo’s statement is applicable in this instance as well, as Southeast Asian governments need to consider re-aligning their “individual”, sovereign-state drug enforcement policies with the vision and policies of the larger, wider global community.