The nations of the Commonwealth are indebted to Britain for many things, but one unfortunate legacy that 37 of the 54 Commonwealth countries owe to former British rule is the death penalty. Of those Commonwealth countries that retain the death penalty as part of their criminal code, seven have carried out executions in recent years: Bangladesh, Botswana, India, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Singapore.
Singapore is one of the world’s leading executioners, with more than 400 prisoners having been hanged there since 1991. With a population of just four million, this gives the Singapore government the dubious title of having the highest rate of execution of any country in the world.
The Singapore Penal Code provides for a mandatory death sentence for a broad range of different offences, including murder, attempted murder and 20 different drug offences. In such cases, the criminal court is deprived of any discretion to weigh the evidence in order to consider the circumstances in which the crime was committed. Resultant decisions are often observed to be arbitrary and disproportionate to the crime. This is certainly not a legacy of the British courts which have maintained a reputation over a long period of time of giving the accused a fair trial and a transparent process of investigating criminal actions and imposing criminal sanctions.
Singapore’s enthusiasm for putting a noose around the neck of criminal offenders now marks it out for special attention in the worldwide community. The United Nations and the European Union have both raised their concerns in international forums, such as a recent session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. The Singapore government’s official response was simply: ‘The death penalty is primarily a criminal justice issue, and therefore is a question for the sovereign jurisdiction of each country … the right to life is not the only right, and … it is the duty of societies and governments to decide how to balance competing rights against each other.’
It is clear that the right to life is not the only right, but in most societies it is now recognised as an absolute one, against which other rights are to be balanced. The right to have private property, to accumulate wealth, to build a prosperous society, and to defend one’s privacy and independence are all to be balanced by a deeper, more abiding right to life.
In those Commonwealth countries that are actively executing their own citizens and foreign