There is a ticking clock on the Amnesty International website. There are less than 14 hours left before Tangaraju Suppiah is hanged in Singapore, after being found guilty of inciting the trafficking of 1kg of cannabis and sentenced to death.
Tangaraju, 46, is due to be executed tomorrow, according to a notice sent by the prison service to his family and posted by human rights activists on social media.
His sister Leela spoke yesterday in Singapore asking for a last-minute miracle, on the verge of tears. “I know that my brother did nothing wrong, but I would like justice to review the case from the beginning,” he said while denouncing the possible errors that were made during the process, in an act organized by the NGO Transformative Justice Collective, calling for the abolition of capital punishment. The family of the convicted person has sent a letter to the president of the country, Halimah Yacob, asking her to consider and accept the petition for clemency
Tangaraju was arrested in 2014 for drug use and for failing to appear for a drug test, reports the AP agency. He later linked himself to two drug traffickers through a mobile with which the delivery of the cannabis was coordinated. In 2017, he was convicted of complicity in trafficking a kilo of cannabis, twice the amount that can carry the death penalty in Singapore.
But that conviction is based on statements from his police interrogation, taken without a lawyer or an interpreter being present. It also relied on the testimony of two other men, one of whom had the charges dismissed.
Amnesty, which collects signatures from the government of the Asian country on its website to stop the execution at the last moment, describes the sentence as “extremely cruel” and “a violation of international law.”
“What is especially worrying is that Tangaraju (…) never touched the drug,” human rights activist Kirsten Han stressed in statements collected by AFP.
At the opposite extreme, High Court Judge Hoo Sheau Peng maintains that the defendant’s responsibility was proven “beyond reasonable doubt.”
Human rights organizations are calling for the abolition of the death penalty in Singapore, which has some of the world’s toughest drug laws and believes that capital punishment remains an effective deterrent against trafficking.
Singapore resumed execution by hanging in March 2022 after a hiatus of more than two years. Last year 11 executions were carried out, all for drug offences. The hanging of a Malaysian man with an intellectual disability – just a year ago – sparked a wave of criticism across the planet.
That case set off all the alarms and several international organizations raised their voices, but the execution was carried out despite everything. Nagen was executed for smuggling 42 grams of heroin into Singapore; the country allows imposing the death penalty from 15 grams in the case of this substance.
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