In 2005, an Australian citizen was hanged in Singapore. It could happen again.

by Hon. Lex Lasry AM KC

In the very early morning of December 2, 2005, my client Van Nguyen was hanged in Singapore’s Changi Prison. His offence? Carrying 396 grams of poorly concealed heroin from Phnom Penh. The drugs were detected during a stopover in Singapore as Van tried to board a Qantas flight to Australia at Changi Airport, gate C23. From that moment, he was a dead man walking. Changi carries a meaning of suffering for many.

After his arrest, many of us became involved and for some it was a cause, almost celebre.  Why? Van was an Australian citizen, and we object when foreign governments who claim to be democratic kill Australians. Indeed, we don’t like it when governments kill anyone in the name of justice. The day before Van was hanged, Lee Hsien Loong, then Prime Minister of Singapore, said the death penalty "is necessary and is part of the criminal justice system." Nonsense.

At the time, Alexander Downer was Australia’s Foreign Minister.  He assured me in a meeting about Van’s case in 2003 that the Australian public would not be interested in Van’s fate. After all, Van was of Vietnamese origin, the son of a refugee and a small-time drug mule. Downer was completely wrong.

The Australian public took the case to heart. People still tell me they remember where they were on the day Van was executed. Veteran journalist Jana Wendt told me she was in a taxi in Sydney when the driver said something like, “I suppose they have killed that young boy by now.” She cried then, and she again shed a tear later telling me the story. People nearby wondered what I had done to upset such a beautiful and famous woman over a lunch.

Van’s mother, Kim, his twin brother, Khoa, and his circle of close friends were devastated by all that happened. They fought for him, and they lost.

But inevitably, interest waned. Van was dead. The fight was over.

A year after Van was executed, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran were sentenced to death in Bali for drug offending. They were executed nine years later despite their total rehabilitation. Similar reactions. Cries of injustice but another failure. So-called democratic governments with an authoritarian bent maintain capital punishment because they think it makes them look strong and it can be rationalised as being a deterrent. It isn’t.

However, some good did arise from the collective outrage over these executions. In 2018, the Australian government released its strategy for the abolition of the death penalty, a bipartisan commitment opposing the death penalty in all circumstances, for all people. In Australia, the Capital Punishment Justice Project and Eleos Justice at Monash University are focused on restricting and abolishing the death penalty in Asia, given 90 per cent of the world’s executions occur in that region.

I am writing about Singapore now because people who supported us in 2005 should be aware of how Singapore continues to conduct itself in relation to the death penalty. Despite a worldwide trend away from the death penalty for drugs, Singapore remains intransigent, continuing to kill people for non-violent drug offences. Their government must be thrilled with the success of Donald Trump in regaining the White House, another death penalty protagonist.

As of 13 November 2024, there were more than 50 prisoners on death row in Singapore, most of them for drug offences. Fifteen grams of pure heroin is enough to attract the mandatory death penalty. In Victoria, the commercial quantity for pure heroin is 50 grams (for mixed weight heroin, it is 250 grams). According to the Sentencing Council of Victoria, the median total effective sentence for trafficking in a commercial quantity of drugs is four years and nine months’ jail, while the median non-parole period is three years.

But, back to death.

In Singapore, these death-row prisoners – most pathetically poor and with a drug addiction – are kept in solitary confinement and can wait years to be killed. Between 2020 and early 2022 there was a pause in executions, but since March 2022, there have been 25 hangings in Singapore, mostly for drug offences. On Friday 29 November, Masoud Rahimi bin Mehrzad was hanged after being convicted of trafficking not less than 31.14 grams of diamorphine; it was the fourth drug-related execution in November. He was on death row for 14 years.

Between 2002 and 2005 we represented Van Nguyen, doing much of the work from Australia and through a lawyer in Singapore, notwithstanding my 17 trips to and from Singapore. In 2004, I sought admission to the Singapore Supreme Court to enable me to conduct Van’s defence. That application failed, as they always do. They do not want non-compliant foreign lawyers, and the threat of costs orders is waved in front of the local lawyers who might be minded to offer help running so-called “frivolous” arguments.

Increasingly, prisoners have had to represent themselves. Outside prison, their stories are told by brave local anti-death-penalty activists. They are volunteers who stand accused by the government of “romanticising” or “glorifying” drug traffickers. The ruling People’s Action Party’s official platform describes them in the following way:

“…we go back to their fondness for virtue-signalling. Highly educated and privileged, many anti-death penalty activists are either naïve at best or plagued by a saviour complex. To them, drug traffickers on death row make for the perfect underclass. Victims of circumstance with little to no agency in their actions. 

And considering how every David needs a Goliath, the criminal justice system thus becomes the enemy. Forget the fact that Singapore ranks consistently as one of the least corrupt countries in the world. In the misguided world of activism, the courts are unfair towards defence lawyers, dismissive of their appeals and racially biased. All are baseless accusations. But yet, the myths continue to gain traction among those consumed by a need to showcase their virtue. There is the activist group Transformative Justice Collective [that has] seemingly lost sight of the bigger picture and the real enemy.”

Members of the Transformative Justice Collective, who do this very difficult work, have also been the subject of police investigations in relation to their abolitionist advocacy. In June 2022, two members were questioned by police after investigations were opened under the Public Order Act 2009, which criminalises public cause-related assemblies that did not obtain police permits.

During the questioning, the police also confiscated the anti-death penalty t-shirts that they wore to the police station, claiming their act of walking together from the market across the street to the police station wearing these shirts could have constituted an illegal procession under the Public Order Act. Others have also been questioned by the police over their participation in vigils for death-row prisoners who have since been executed.

So, since 2005, it’s worse. We can expect an increase in the execution rate. There has been no revision of the government’s view and Singapore ignores the United Nations’ Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, aiming at the abolition of the death penalty. If an Australian citizen finds themselves in the same situation as Van Nguyen, they can expect the same fate.

An edited version of this opinion piece was first published in The Age on 3 December 2024. It is republished with permission.