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Singapore on Wednesday executed a man convicted of conspiring to traffic 2.24 pounds of cannabis that he was not alleged to have directly handled, in the final step of a case that 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 Suppiah, 46, to an attempted exchange of cannabis in September 2013 through a phone number he denied having access to at the time. He was sentenced in 2018 to hang, under Singapore’s near-mandatory death penalty policy for trafficking more than 1.1 pounds of cannabis.
Tangaraju’s family and rights groups had alleged that his rights were not adequately protected, and had called on the government to halt the execution. They alleged that he was interrogated without legal counsel — Singapore does not require that people under questioning be proed immediate access to a lawyer — and that authorities denied his requests for a Tamil-language interpreter. His conviction relied on phone records, but prosecutors were not able to recover his cellphone for analysis, court documents show.
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 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 Tangaraju was “accorded full due process under the law” and called the assertion that he had requested an interpreter “disingenuous.”
The death sentence was 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.”
The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights had called on Singapore to “urgently reconsider” the execution, which it said was “incompatible with international norms and standards.”
Singapore has justified its tough drugs policy on its proximity to the Golden Triangle, a Southeast Asian region that is a major gateway for illicit drug production and trafficking. But many of its neighbors have recently softened their stances: Thailand legalized the growth and trade of cannabis in 2022, while Malaysia the same year moved to end its use of a mandatory death penalty for nonviolent drug offenses. In the United States, at least 21 states have loosened restrictions on cannabis to allow for limited nonmedical use.
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 Singapore is one of fewer than a dozen countries — including Yemen, Iran and Sudan — that have mandatory capital punishment for some drug offenses.
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Tangaraju’s hanging was 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.”
“More than drugs, it is our drug policy that ruins lives in Singapore,” said Kokila Annamalai, an activist against capital punishment.
Singapore’s government, reportedly a leader in organizing international opposition against loosening drug restrictions, maintains that its policies are successful in curbing narcotics use. It has also said 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.”
