With Death Penalty at Home, Can Indonesia Save Its Citizens Abroad?

Source: Jakarta Globe (22 March 2018)

http://jakartaglobe.id/news/death-penalty-home-can-indonesia-save-citizens-abroad/

Jakarta. The government sent a protest note to Saudi Arabia on Monday (19/03), after an Indonesian national was beheaded in Mecca. Saudi authorities did not inform Indonesia that its citizen would be executed.

Zaini Misrin, a 53-year-old man from Bangkalan in East Java's island of Madura, was a migrant worker convicted of the murder of his Saudi employer. He was executed on Sunday.

"The Indonesian government did not receive any notification prior to the execution of Zaini Misrin," citizen protection and legal aid director at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lalu Muhammad Iqbal, said during a press conference in Jakarta.

Although the kingdom has no regulatory obligation to issue such notifications, since the two countries are in friendly relations, Indonesia should have been officially apprised of the decision, he said.

With nearly 200 Indonesians facing capital punishment abroad, the government has been making considerable efforts to stay their execution.

However, despite huge opposition domestically and on the international stage, and despite its non-permanent seat at the United Nation High Commission of Human Rights, Indonesia itself implements the death penalty. This, in the eyes of many, renders inconclusive the country's attempts to save its own citizens from the cruel and unusual punishment.

Since 2011, 583 Indonesians have been sentenced to death abroad. The executions of 392 have been stayed. There are 188 ongoing cases in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, China and the United Arab Emirates.

Most of the cases involve migrant workers, but there are also drug trafficking convicts, especially in Malaysia.

The Case of Zaini

Zaini's journey to Saudi Arabia began in 1992, when he started working as a private driver for Abdullah bin Umar as-Sindi. He then came back to Indonesia, and returned to work for the same employer in 1996.

Zaini was arrested by Saudi authorities in July 2004, on charges of murdering As-Sindi. He was convicted in November 2008.

In accordance with Muslim law, in cases of killing and wounding, Saudi Arabia applies qisas, or the law of retaliation — a person who has injured another is to be penalized to a similar degree, unless he or she is pardoned by the victim's family.

Indonesia was granted consular access to Zaini only in 2008. The delay, according to Lalu, was caused by imperfections in the previous protection system for Indonesian citizens abroad.

To save Zaini, the government appointed two lawyers in 2011, while presidents Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Joko "Jokowi" Widodo requested Saudi Arabia that he be granted clemency. Jokowi raised the issue three times with King Salman bin Abdulaziz. So did Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi during her meetings with the Saudi counterpart, Adel Jubeir.

Zaini's family came to Saudi Arabia with a plea for pardon from As-Sindi's family. To no avail.

The Indonesian government requested a case review in January 2017. It was rejected. Another appeal was filed in January this year, and the case was stiil ongoing at the time of Zaini's death.

"We have summoned the Saudi ambassador to express our disapproval over the execution and the fact that it took place despite the ongoing legal process," Lalu said.

According to Jakarta-based Migrant Care, Zaini's testimony reveals he confessed the murder under pressure and intimidation by Saudi authorities.

"During his trial, Zaini Misrin had no neutral and impartial translator," the organization said in a statement.

Pardon

Under the principle of qisas, offenders can receive forgiveness from their victim's closest relatives. This in 2017 saved the life of Masamah, another Indonesian migrant worker in Saudi Arabia, who was convicted of murdering her employer's child in 2009.

An alternative punishment to qisas is diya or "blood money" — the financial compensation paid to the heirs of a victim.

In April 2014, the Indonesian government paid 7 million riyal ($1.9 million) to free Satinah Binti Jumadi Ahmad from death row in Saudi Arabia.

Satinah, a domestic helper from Ungaran, Central Java, was convicted of killing her Saudi employer in 2007. She said she acted in self-defense.

According to Lalu, in Zaini's case, the victim's family was not willing to exercise its right to pardon or diya.

More Protection

To offer more protection to Indonesian citizens working abroad, the House of Representatives passed a new law in October.

The 2017 Law on Migrant Workers replaced the 2004 Law on the Placement and Protection of Indonesian Migrant Workers. It establishes a framework to improve cooperation between the central government and local authorities in the migrants' places of origin, and guarantees more assistance to them, including insurance and competency training.

Director general for labor supervision at the Ministry of Manpower and Transmigration, Maruli Apul Hasoloan, said during Monday's conference that all prospective migrant workers will be informed about their rights and mechanisms to protect them, as well as the existing regulations on labor in their receiving countries.

The government is now also particularly careful about making sure that Indonesians willing to work abroad have all their documents and permits cleared before they leave.

"According to our statistics, 92 percent of the cases against Indonesian migrant workers are related to those who left the country without following the necessary legal procedures," said Hermono, secretary of the National Board for Placement and Protection of Indonesian Overseas Workers (BNP2TKI).

UN Human Rights Office condemns execution for drug-related offences in Singapore

Source: The Online Citizen (16 March 2018)

https://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2018/03/16/un-human-rights-office-condemns-execution-for-drug-related-offences-in-singapore/

BANGKOK (16 March 2018) – The UN Human Rights Office for South-East Asia condemns the execution of Singaporean national Hishamrudin bin Mohd for a drug-related offence this morning, expressing concerns that he had not been able to file a clemency petition.

“Under international law, the death penalty may only be used for ‘the most serious crimes’ which has been interpreted to mean only crimes involving intentional killing,” said the Office’s Regional Representative, Cynthia Veliko. “Drug-related offences do not fall under this threshold.”

“We deeply regret that in 2017, eight individuals were executed for drug-related offences in Singapore, which is a sharp increase from previous years. We have also received information that there was another execution for drug-related offences last Friday, bringing the total known figure to two executions so far in 2018,” she said.

This week, Hishamrudin bin Mohd filed a last-minute application for judicial review by the Court of Appeal and had a closed-door hearing on 15 March 2018. However, the Court of Appeal denied his application.

On Monday, Mr. Hishamrudin’s family was informed that he would be executed on 16 March 2018. They were also informed that the petition for clemency had been rejected, although they had not yet filed a proper clemency petition on his case.

Mr. Hishamrudin, 57, was arrested and charged with two offences for possessing a total of 38.50 grams of a pure form of heroin on 7 October 2010. He has consistently maintained his innocence, and claimed to have no knowledge of the nature of the drugs, nor that he possessed them for the purposes of trafficking.

On 6 April 2016, Mr. Hishamrudin was convicted and sentenced to death under section 33B of the Misuse of Drugs Act. On 3 July 2017, his appeal was dismissed by the Court of Appeal.

“We repeat our call to the Government of Singapore to immediately instate a moratorium on the use of the death penalty as part of a process toward the full abolishment of capital punishment,” said Ms. Veliko.

Trump reportedly praised Singapore for executing drug dealers. Here’s how they’re killed.

Source: The Washington Post (27 February 2018)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/02/27/trump-reportedly-praised-singapore-for-executing-drug-dealers-heres-how-theyre-killed/?utm_term=.d3e29b3f0884

President Trump has been privately praising Singapore, the small city-state once known as the world's most active executioner per capita.

This is according to Axios, which reported Sunday that the president has been telling friends for months that the death penalty should be imposed on drug dealers in the United States — similar to a policy enforced for decades by Singapore.

An anonymous senior administration official told Axios that the president has also spoken admiringly about the executions of drug traffickers in China and the Philippines, and has said he would love to have a law that allows the United States to execute drug dealers without exception. Axios reporter Jonathan Swan also said Tuesday that Trump has “talked up” executions in China, the Philippines and Singapore to not just confidants but also members of Congress and some foreign leaders. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump's reported comments are consistent with his penchant for embracing no-holds-barred policies and rhetoric on drug crimes, from his Justice Department's directive to federal prosecutors to pursue the harshest penalties possible, to his extraordinary endorsement of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, whose drug war has left thousands of suspected drug dealers dead without as much as a day in court.

But Singapore's unyielding stance on law and order has long raised red flags among human rights groups, especially as more and more countries eliminate the death penalty. Advocates say Singapore's judicial process is often shrouded in secrecy and misinformation and is designed to tip the scales of justice heavily toward prosecutors, who have nearly limitless power over who dies and who is spared.

The method has also been met with harsh criticism.

People convicted of capital offenses in Singapore are executed by hanging, which Kirsten Han, co-founder of an anti-death penalty group in Southeast Asia, described in chilling detail: “A noose — measured according to the individual's height — is placed over the prisoner's head, the knot behind the right ear to ensure the spinal cord is snapped upon the impact of the long drop through the trapdoor.”

Families are never present, just prison officers and doctors.

In a seemingly unusual part of the execution practice in Singapore, those condemned to die are allowed to change into regular clothes the day before they're executed — so they can pose for a picture that will be given to loved ones as a keepsake.


Australia's then-attorney general called the method “a most unfortunate, barbaric act” in 2005, when an Australian heroin trafficker was executed in Changi Prison. Many Australians held candlelit vigils on the eve of Nguyen Tuong Van's execution.

Hanging was the most common method of execution in the United States in the 1800s before widespread adoption of the electric chair. It remains widespread in several countries in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

It is the lone method of capital punishment in Singapore, where executions are on the decline: The government has executed 24 people over the past decade — 16 of whom were convicted of drug crimes.

Singapore's mandatory death sentence would be imposed equally on a person who trafficked more than 15 grams of heroin and a person who bombed a government building and killed dozens. To place this in context, trafficking a much larger amount of heroin in the United States — 100 to 999 grams — is punishable by five to 40 years in prison.

Similarly, Singapore has some of the world's toughest gun laws. For example, a person who fires a gun, or attempts to fire a gun, while committing a crime in Singapore faces a mandatory death sentence upon conviction — even if nobody is wounded or killed.

“Simply having the keys to a car or to a room or to a house where drugs were found” means that a person is a presumed drug trafficker and, therefore, could face the death penalty, said Chiara Sangiorgio, a death penalty expert for Amnesty International.

Hence, there is no presumption of innocence. The burden of proof is on the accused, who are often poor people far down the drug chain, and foreigners who might not be fluent in the local languages, Sangiorgio said.

Advocates say there's no evidence that executions are any more of a crime deterrent than lesser punishments. In 2009, researchers from Columbia Law School compared murder rates in Singapore and Hong Kong, where capital punishment was abolished in 1993, and found little difference.

But Singaporean officials have long insisted that the specter of death, particularly for drug traffickers, has worked for their city-state.

“Singapore is relatively drug-free, and the administration is under control. There are no drug havens, no no-go zones, no drug production centers, no needle exchange programs,” K. Shanmugam, Singapore's minister of home affairs and law, said in 2016.

A “soft approach,” he said, would flood the island state with narcotics — a line of thinking that appears to be similar to Trump's.

The number of executions every year, however, has significantly dropped, and changes have been adopted.

Singapore, which is about half the size of Los Angeles, executed 76 people in 1994 and 73 in 1995, when the population was just more than 3 million. In 2015 and 2016, there were just eight executions in total on the island — five for people convicted of drug crimes.

Changes in 2013 to Singapore's Misuse of Drugs Act gave judges leeway in sentencing if defendants meet two conditions: (1) they were merely couriers or drug mules and (2) they have greatly cooperated with law enforcement officers by tipping them about other drug traffickers. Alternatively, those who have proven that they are couriers can also be spared if they are mentally or intellectually disabled. A judge can impose lesser sentences, such as life imprisonment and caning — a type of punishment that drew controversy in the United States in 1994, when a 19-year-old American was caned for vandalism.

The revised laws have cut the number of those sentenced to death. According to a recent study by Amnesty International, 38 out of 93 people convicted of murder and drug trafficking from Jan. 1, 2013, were spared from hanging.

Shanmugam, the Singaporean minister, also said last year that the drug trade has hardly flourished since the changes: Officials have caught 90 traffickers since 2012 through the help of drug couriers who cooperate in exchange for leniency, he said.

Eugene K.B. Tan, a professor at the Singapore Management University School of Law, called the revisions “tempering justice with mercy” in a 2016 column for the Straits Times.

“The Government has determined that the mandatory death penalty (MDP) may not be needed for all types of serious crimes. This is an important first step, notwithstanding the attraction and force of the MDP was its unequivocal demonstration of zero tolerance and resolve in maximum deterrence,” Tan wrote. “Yet, the shift to the discretionary death penalty regime should not be misconstrued as Singapore letting up on drug trafficking and murders. Instead, this shift was necessary to retain public confidence and legitimacy in our administration of criminal justice.”

But the revisions did little to ease the concerns of human rights advocates.

Amnesty International analyzed judgments issued by Singapore's High Court and Court of Appeal on the cases of 137 people charged with capital offenses from 2008, five years before the changes took place, to 2017, four years after. The organization said it found that although executions are happening far less often, major human rights violations still occur.

Defense attorneys, for example, are never present during interrogations. In many cases, particularly in the case of foreigners, the statements that lead to conviction were either misrepresented or were lost in translation, Sangiorgio said.

Prosecutors and not the judges still have unchallenged power to decide whether defendants should be spared from the gallows based on their level of cooperation. Prosecutors must first issue what is called a “certificate of substantive assistance,” which confirms that a defendant has given them substantial information about other drug traffickers. Only then can judges decide on a lesser punishment. In many cases, however, defendants can be so far down the drug hierarchy that they do not have any meaningful information to give, Sangiorgio said.

“In other words, people pay with their lives for failing to provide information which they are incapable of providing,” according to the study.

Take, for example, the case of a 32-year-old Malaysian man who was convicted after the Central Narcotics Bureau found him with 16.56 grams of heroin, just above the legal threshold. He told police that a friend had offered to pay him the equivalent of $236 to deliver the heroin. His attorney asked the High Court to consider him a courier, but prosecutors, without explanation, declined to issue a certificate of substantive assistance, leaving the judge with no other choice but to sentence him to death.

Here's how the High Court described the state of affairs in a 2016 ruling on the case of a man who was convicted of trafficking more than 100 grams of heroin:

“He is not given a certificate of substantive assistance.... We do not know why. He might not have much assistance to give. He might have declined to assist, in which event we do not know if his depressive illness had any connection to that attitude.... The language of the law here is precise and simple. Life, on the other hand, is not so. Every life is complex in its own way. The mandatory death penalty has been the law for a long time and I do not think that in providing the changes set out in [Section 33B Parliament] has become more lenient towards drug trafficking. This crime is no less serious today than it was before the amendment.”

Singapore and the United States were among the 40 countries and territories that voted against a United Nations resolution calling for a global moratorium on executions in 2016.

Trump, according to Axios, has acknowledged that executing people for drug offenses would never happen in the United States. In trying to add some nuance to Trump's comments, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, who is in charge of the administration's anti-drug efforts, told Axios that the president was talking about drug dealers who cause mass overdose deaths by flooding communities with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid far more potent than heroin or morphine.

“The president makes a distinction between those that are languishing in prison for low-level drug offenses and the kingpins hauling thousands of lethal doses of fentanyl into communities, that are responsible for many casualties in a single weekend,” Conway said.