Singapore executed a citizen of the island on Friday for trafficking around 30 grams of heroin, the first woman to be executed in almost two decades, amid a new uptick in drug-related executions in the city-state. asian.
Saridewi Djamani, a 45-year-old Singaporean, was executed after being sentenced to death in July 2018, the Singapore Narcotics Bureau (CNB) confirmed in a statement today.
According to the NGO Transformative Justice Collective (TJC), this is the first woman executed in the Southeast Asian country since 2004 and the fourth person sent to the gallows so far this year, in all cases for drug trafficking crimes.
The tiny nation, one of the countries with the most draconian drug laws in the world, has pushed executions recently: on Wednesday a 56-year-old man, also from the Asian city-state, was hanged for trafficking around 50 grams of heroin, and TJC reported on Thursday another execution scheduled for Aug. 3. In total, the island has executed 15 people since March 2022, according to calculations by the NGO.
The CNB added in the statement today that the Supreme Court of Singapore rejected an appeal by Saridewi’s lawyers on October 6 last year, and that the process met legal requirements.
According to TFJ, she was one of two women remaining on Singapore’s death row, and the first to be executed since hairdresser Yen May Woen in 2004, also for drug offences.
The first execution of the year, in April, aroused criticism especially because it was an attempt to traffic marijuana -whose consumption is legal in neighboring countries such as Thailand- and doubts about the judicial process, since the executed person and his entourage claimed that he would never had seen or touched the drug. The UN unsuccessfully petitioned Singapore to stop the execution.
The prosperous nation, with one of the highest GDP per capita on the planet, contemplates the death penalty for a minimum of 500 grams of marijuana trafficking and 15 grams of heroin and uses hanging as a method of execution, in highly opaque procedures.
After a halt in executions for two years due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Singapore broke records last year by hanging 11 prisoners in just a few months, including a heroin dealer with intellectual disabilities.
