The case of a man sentenced to death for smuggling two pounds of cannabis into the Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore has focused global attention on the disturbing reality that there are still countries on Earth where you can be sent to the gallows for a substance that legal fortunes are now being made. Singapore news, unfortunately, is not the first case of its kind in recent years. And despite an international outcry every time, nothing seems to change in these uncompromising regimes.
Hanging for two pounds in Singapore?
The case of Omar Yacob Bamadhaj leaked to international news on October 12, when the Singapore Supreme Court dismissed his appeal, meaning the 41-year-old faces the death by penny. The sentence was handed down this February, after he was convicted of carrying 1 kilogram (about two pounds) of cannabis to the city-state in 2018.
As reported by Channel News Asia, Omar and his father crossed from Singapore to Malaysia on July 11, 2018 to buy groceries and attend evening prayers at a mosque. While in a car wash, he met two acquaintances, who offered to pay him to take three packages wrapped in newspapers to Singapore. In a statement to police after his arrest, he said the deal was A $ 500 per package (about US $ 370). He said he knew the “green” was marijuana and fought with it for 20 minutes before accepting the deal, because he was “desperate for money.”
At trial, he pleaded not guilty and said he did not know what was inside the packages. But this contradicted his initial statement to the police and he was convicted.
Amnesty International’s death penalty adviser Chiara Sangiorgio told the media after the Apex Court’s decision: “By rejecting the appeal of Omar Yacob Bamadhaj, the Singapore authorities have violated the guarantees. and have sentenced another person convicted of drug trafficking to death. “
Others have also taken note.
Reggae superstar Ziggy Marley took to social media to denounce the decision of the Apex Court. As DanceHallMag points out, Marley wrote on Instagram, “So the #Singapur government will kill a human being for two pounds of cannabis. Is it fair or moral?”
Escaping the gallows in Malaysia
There is, unfortunately, a feeling of déjà vu in all of this. In October 2018 there was a similar global outcry for a man sentenced to death in Malaysia for providing medicinal cannabis oil to patients with epilepsy and cancer. In fact, the Malaysian government responded to international protests by promising to abolish the death penalty.
But the brief focus of the media continued and, three years later, nothing has happened. It was only this February that hashish oil producer Muhammad Lukman formally escaped the gallows after the Federal Court allowed his appeal of the death sentence, Free Malaysia Today reported. However, the court upheld his guilt under Malaysia’s harsh Dangerous Drugs Act and sentenced him to five years for each of the two charges of possession. The terms must be concurrent simultaneously, that is, it will be five years old.
And the death penalty is still in the books, including drug offenses. This month, a 55-year-old single mother of nine has been sentenced to death on a methamphetamine charge. Free Malaysia Today reports that Hairun Jalmani, a fisherman from Sabah province in the rainforest, was convicted of possessing 113.9 grams (or four ounces) of methamphetamine in 2018.
And the political opposition is still pressuring the government to at least lift legal pressure on medical cannabis. In September, MP Syed Saddiq Syed Abdul Rahman of the United Democratic Alliance of Malaysia (MUDA) said in parliament, amid budget debates, that the country could fall behind in the global cannabis boom if not ‘lightness. .
“I hope the government can present a working paper that is transparent, sincere, driven by data and science on the pros and cons of sanctioning the hemp and medical marijuana industry,” Saddiq said, according to the Malay Mail. “I say that because today there are more than 40 countries where hemp or medical marijuana has been approved … We don’t want Malaysia to be left behind.”
Flight from Burma
Southeast Asia has some of the worst laws in this regard, and a case of another country in the region also briefly gained the attention of the international press two years ago, in part because it had involved a American.
In April 2019, U.S. citizen John Fredric Todoroki was part of a trio arrested in Burma for running a 20-acre cannabis plantation in a Mandalay industrial park, and potentially facing the death penalty.
In March 2020, Todoroki, 63, fled the country while on bail and has now returned to the United States, Burmese news site The Irrawaddy reported. Todoroki spent nearly four months in Myingyan prison until he was granted a medical bail, set at 325 million kyats (about US $ 230,000), due to respiratory problems he had developed behind bars. When he jumped bail, a court had just rejected his appeal of the indictment, dismissing his claim that he had a permit for the planting of local authorities.
Things didn’t go so well for Todoroki’s Burmese couple and co-defendant. The same month Todoroki fled the country, U Shein Latt was sentenced to 20 years in prison, The Associated Press reported. Charges were dropped against the third person arrested in the raid, Shunlei Myat Noe, a young Burmese woman who worked as a contract worker on the plantation. A photo in Myanmar Now showed police driving her to a court hearing in January 2020, apparently in tears.
Political games in China
China, the world’s largest executioner, by far, has the ambition to enter the cannabis boom, providing hemp for the global CBD market. But cannabis is more severely banned in China than almost any other country in the world, and the People’s Republic continues to execute thousands every year for drug crimes. And some recent cases about foreigners have been clearly politicized.
The latest case of Robert Lloyd Schellenberg, a Canadian who was initially sentenced to 15 years in prison for methamphetamine trafficking by a court in the northeastern city of Dalian, Liaoning Province, recently came to light in the news in December 2018. But the following month he was ordered to stand trial again because prosecutors said his sentence had been too light. In a one-day trial, he was sentenced to death.
Schellenberg’s new trial was widely regarded as retribution for the arrest in Canada of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Chinese technology company Huawei. Meng had been arrested in Vancouver that December at the request of U.S. authorities, who accused her of helping the company evade sanctions against Iran. Shortly after Meng’s arrest, China had also arrested former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig and Canadian businessman Michael Spavor for spurious and secret reasons for “endangering state security.”
More such cases followed. In April 2019, Canadian citizen Fan Wei was sentenced to death for methamphetamine trafficking by the Jiangmen Intermediate People’s Court in Guangdong Province. In August 2020, the Guangzhou Intermediate People’s Court sentenced Canadian citizen Xu Weihong to death for methamphetamine trafficking. That same month, the Foshan Intermediate People’s Court, also in Guangdong Province, sentenced to death Canadian citizen Ye Jianhui accused of smuggling 217 kilos of MDMA into the country.
China has rejected Canadian leniency appeals in these cases, and the Foreign Ministry said in a statement: “Drug-related crimes are considered serious crimes around the world. Chinese law upheld of death and strictly controls its application “.
In August 2021, the Liaoning Higher People’s Court upheld Schellenberg’s death sentence.
The following month, the U.S. Department of Justice reached an agreement that allowed Meng Wanzhou to return to China after admitting some violations in the case of violation of sanctions. (Meng had spent the past three years on bail of about $ 8 million in his two luxury homes in Vancouver.)
A few hours after the announcement of the agreement, China responded, releasing Kovrig and Spavor.
But there has been no clemency for Robert Schellenberg, Xu Weihong, Ye Jianhui and Fan Wei, who are still facing the firing squad (this is how it is done in China). Whether they will receive isolation has been a topic of much speculation in the Canadian media. And they are among the 115 Canadians detained in China, most on drug charges.
Amnesty International’s most recent report on global executions found that they actually declined in 2020, continuing the trend of recent years. But China was not even included in the world count of some 475 executions carried out last year by the groups, because the People’s Republic has no statistics. As the Al-Jazeera report on Amnesty’s findings points out, China is believed to carry out thousands of executions each year, many for drug offenses. And while methamphetamine unfortunately seems to be more available in China than cannabis, we can assume that some of these thousands of annual executions are for the herb.
25 years for CBD in the UAE
Almost all of the executions Amnesty recorded last year were in the Middle East, and that region competes with East and Southeast Asia for the world’s toughest drug laws.
The case of a Briton sentenced to 25 years in prison for bringing CBD oil to the United Arab Emirates is currently news in England. As reported by BBC News, Billy Hood, a 24-year-old West London football coach, was arrested this February in Dubai after four bottles of vape liquid containing CBD oil were found in his car. He claims he was forced to sign a false confession about cannabinoid trafficking, which is legal to vaporize in the UK. The “confession” he signed was in Arabic, a language he cannot read.
The UAE National reports that the Directorate General of Drug Control (GDDC) received a report that Hood owned quantities of synthetic cannabis oil with the intention of selling them. He is currently serving his sentence.
Death penalty in the US?
No global survey on the death penalty should overlook the United States, which carried out 17 executions last year. And while none of them were for drug offenses, the country formerly known as the “leader of the free world” actually has a death penalty for cannabis in books, in sufficient quantities. Large-scale cannabis growers and traffickers, that is, at least 60,000 plants or kilos, may be sentenced to death under the “Kingpin” provision of the Federal Death Penalty Act, which was an amendment to the Violent Crime Control Act and Law Enforcement Act, 1994.
After then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memorandum in March 2018 urging prosecutors to call for the death penalty for those who “sell extremely large amounts of drugs,” even the Conventional media began to sound the alarm that it could really be used against large scale. legal cannabis growers in places like California.
President Joe Biden calls his strategy to restore U.S. global leadership after the Trump era “America’s Example of Power” and has a lot to say about both respect for human rights and the challenge of terrible violations of China. But the United States clearly has work to do to tidy up its own home before it can challenge others on drug-related rights abuses.
