What did you do to stop death penalty here, lawyer asks Bar

 

Two men – a Malaysian and a Singaporean – are scheduled to be hanged tomorrow in Singapore.

PETALING JAYA: A senior lawyer has slammed the Malaysian Bar for urging the Singapore government to grant clemency to a Sabahan who is scheduled to be hanged tomorrow for drug trafficking when capital punishment exists in Malaysia.

Naran Singh said the Bar should not be lecturing Singapore as it had not managed to remove capital punishment here.

“We should put our house in order and abolish the death penalty here before talking about what happens in another sovereign nation,” he told FMT.

Naran was referring to the scheduled hanging tomorrow of Sabahan Pausi Jefridin and Singaporean Roslan Bakar, both with low IQs, who had been found guilty of drug trafficking.

Naran Singh.

Bar president AG Kalidas, in a statement yesterday, hoped the Singapore government would consider the cognitive impairments of Pausi and Roslan.

Kalidas noted that Malaysia and Singapore were signatories to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which states that a mentally-impaired person cannot be hanged.

Besides Pausi, another Malaysian, Nagaenthran K Dharmalingam, is also on death row. He filed two applications last month in an attempt to halt his death sentence. Singapore’s Court of Appeal is scheduled to deliver its decision at the end of the month.

Naran said Malaysian courts had been imposing the death sentence, including on foreigners, for drug trafficking and murder for a long time.

“Even women, who were mules in drug cases, were sent to the gallows but little was done to address the issue,” he said, adding most countries did not protest when their nationals were convicted for offences that carried the death penalty.

He said just as other countries respected Malaysian criminal laws, the Bar or any civil society must accept the decision of the Singapore courts based on law and evidence.

It was reported last month that Putrajaya would decide soon on recommendations by a committee chaired by ex-chief justice Richard Malanjum regarding the death penalty.

Law minister Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar said the report, presented in 2020, would be brought to the Cabinet soon.

Lawyers and interest groups have called for a moratorium on the execution of death row inmates until Parliament votes on a bill seeking the abolition of the death penalty.

However, it is unclear whether Putrajaya has frozen all hangings or only the execution of those convicted of drug trafficking since 2019. - FMT