In its annual report, Harm Reduction International says at least 467 drug-related executions took place last year.
At least 467 people were executed for drug offences in 2023, a new record, according to Harm Reduction International (HRI), an NGO that has been tracking the use of the death penalty for drugs since 2007.
“Despite not accounting for the dozens, if not hundreds, of executions believed to have taken place in China, Vietnam, and North Korea, the 467 executions that took place in 2023 represent a 44% increase from 2022,” HRI said in its report, which was released on Tuesday.
Drug executions made up about 42 percent of all known death sentences carried out around the world last year, it added.
HRI said it had confirmed drug-related executions in countries including Iran, Kuwait and Singapore. China treats death penalty data as a state secret and secrecy surrounds the punishment in countries including Vietnam and North Korea.
“Information gaps on death sentences persist, meaning many (if not most) death sentences imposed in 2023 remain unknown,” the report said. “Most notably, no accurate figure can be provided for China, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Thailand. These countries are all believed to regularly impose a significant number of death sentences for drug offences.”
International law prohibits the use of the death penalty for crimes that are not intentional and of “the most serious” nature. The United Nations has stressed that drug offences do not meet that threshold.
Singapore has drawn international criticism after resuming the use of the death penalty in March 2022, following a two-year hiatus during the pandemic.
Some 11 executions, carried out by hanging, took place that year, and at least 16 people had been hanged as of November 2023, according to Human Rights Watch.
Among those executed was Saridewi Djamani, a Singaporean woman who was convicted of drug trafficking in 2018. She was the first woman to be executed in the city-state for almost 20 years.
“Singapore reversed the COVID-19 hiatus on executions, kicking its death row machinery into overdrive,” Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch said in the organisation’s annual report. “The government’s reinvigorated use of the death penalty merely highlighted its disregard for human rights protections and the inherent cruelty of capital punishment.”
Some countries have moved to reform their death penalty regimes in recent years with Malaysia ending the mandatory death sentence, including for drugs, and Pakistan removing the death penalty from the list of punishments that can be imposed for certain violations of its Control of Narcotics Substances Act.
Still, in other countries, defendants continued to be sentenced to death for drug offences.
HRI said such confirmed sentences last year increased by more than 20 percent from 2022. About half of those were passed by courts in Vietnam and a quarter in Indonesia.
At the end of 2023, some 34 countries continued to retain the death penalty for drug crimes.
In Singapore, there are just over 50 people on death row with all but two convicted of drug offences, according to the Transformative Justice Collective, a Singapore-based NGO that campaigns against the death penalty.
On February 28, Singapore hanged Bangladeshi national Ahmed Salim. He was the first person convicted of murder to be hanged in the city-state since 2019.
“Capital punishment is used only for the most serious crimes in Singapore that cause grave harm to the victim, or to society,” the Singapore Police Force said in a statement.
Use of the death penalty surged by 43 percent following huge protests prompted by Mahsa Amini’s death.
Iran hanged at least 834 people in 2023, the second-highest number of executions in two decades, according to a report released by rights groups.
The report, released on Tuesday by Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) and Paris-based Together Against the Death Penalty (ECPM), suggests that the 43 percent spike in the use of capital punishment last year came in reaction to nationwide protests prompted by the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini in 2022.
However, while nine executions were directly linked to attacks on security forces during the 2022 protests, the use of capital punishment was also stepped up in relation to other charges. Drug-related cases accounted for more than half of the total, with 471 people executed on such charges.
The report also notes that members of ethnic minorities, notably the Sunni Baluch from the southeast of Iran, were “grossly overrepresented amongst those executed”.
At least 167 members of the Baluch minority were put to death, accounting for 20 percent of the total last year. The minority accounts for about 5 percent of Iran’s population.
IHR director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam described the figures as a “staggering total”.
“Instilling societal fear is the regime’s only way to hold on to power, and the death penalty is its most important instrument,” he said.
This image, posted on X reportedly on October 26, 2022, shows an unveiled woman standing atop a vehicle as thousands make their way towards Aichi cemetery in Saqez, Mahsa Amini’s home town in Iran’s Kurdistan province, to mark 40 days since her death, defying heightened security measures as part of a bloody crackdown on women-led protests [UGC via AFP]
He also urged the world to take a stand on Tehran’s use of capital punishment.
“The inconsistency in the international community’s reaction to the executions in Iran is unfortunate and sends the wrong signal to the authorities,” he said.
Last year, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said the flurry of death sentences following the outbreak of civil unrest amounted to “state-sanctioned killing”.
According to the report, while most executions happen within the confines of prison, seven were carried out in public – significantly more than in 2022.
At least 22 women were executed last year, marking the highest number in the past decade, the report added.
Fifteen were hanged on murder charges. NGOs have long warned that women who kill an abusive partner or relative risk execution.
Yang has been detained for five years on charges of espionage that he and Australia have rejected.
Australian writer Yang Hengjun, who was detained in China on espionage charges in 2019, has been handed a suspended death sentence by a court in Beijing.
The terms of the sentence mean Yang’s sentence could be commuted to life imprisonment for good behaviour.
“The Australian government is appalled by this outcome,” Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong told reporters as she confirmed the sentence, the SBS News outlet reported.
Wong said Canberra would be responding “in the strongest terms” including by summoning the Chinese ambassador.
“I want to acknowledge the acute distress that Dr Yang and his family will be feeling today, coming after years of uncertainty,” she said.
Yang, a 58-year-old blogger and pro-democracy activist, was arrested in January 2019 when he arrived at Guangzhou airport with his wife, and was accused of having “endangered national security with particularly serious harm to the country and the people”.
Yang, a Chinese-born Australian, has denied the charges against him, as have his friends and family. A previous Australian government described the writer’s detention as “unacceptable”.
On Monday, supporters reacted with dismay to the sentence,
“He is punished by the Chinese government for his criticism of human rights abuses in China and his advocacy for universal values such as human rights, democracy and the rule of law,” friend and colleague Feng Chongyi was quoted as saying by the Sydney Morning Herald.
Feng said Yang’s family, who were in court, had told him of the sentence.
Feng previously told Al Jazeera that Yang worked for the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) at the provincial level for 14 years and began writing spy novels as he became more frustrated with his work.
He moved to Australia in 2000 and five years later, began studying under Feng at the University of Technology Sydney, where he “transformed himself into a liberal”. At the time of his detention, he was working in New York.
Yang was put on trial in May 2021, having had limited access to lawyers. China has not revealed the exact charges against him or which country he is alleged to have been spying for.
Convicted murderer Kenneth Smith, who survived an earlier execution attempt by lethal injection, was killed on Thursday night.
Kenneth Smith, a convicted murderer, has become the first person to be executed by asphyxiation with nitrogen gas in the United States.
Officials said 58-year-old Smith was pronounced dead at 8:25pm on Thursday (02:25 GMT on Friday) at Holman Correctional Facility in Alabama after breathing pure nitrogen gas through a face mask to cause oxygen deprivation.
His death marks the first time that a new execution method has been used in the United States since lethal injection, now the most commonly used method, was introduced in 1982.
Alabama has called its new protocol “the most painless and humane method of execution known to man”.
The last US execution using gas was in 1999 when a convicted murderer was put to death using hydrogen cyanide gas.
Alabama is one of three US states that have approved the use of nitrogen hypoxia as a method of execution, along with Oklahoma and Mississippi.
United Nations human rights experts and lawyers for Smith, who survived Alabama’s previous attempt to execute him by lethal injection, had sought to prevent it, saying the method was risky and could lead to a torturous death or nonfatal injury.
Smith’s execution took about 22 minutes, and he appeared to shake and writhe on the gurney, sometimes pulling against the restraints, for a couple of minutes, according to the Associated Press news agency. That was followed by several minutes of heavy breathing until breathing was no longer perceptible.
In a final statement ahead of his execution, Smith said: “Tonight, Alabama causes humanity to take a step backwards. … I’m leaving with love, peace and light.”
Alabama Governor Kay Ivey said the execution was justice for the murder-for-hire killing of 45-year-old Elizabeth Sennett in March 1988.
“After more than 30 years and attempt after attempt to game the system, Mr Smith has answered for his horrendous crimes. … I pray that Elizabeth Sennett’s family can receive closure after all these years dealing with that great loss,” she said in a statement following Smith’s execution.
Sennett was found dead in her home with eight stab wounds in the chest and one on each side of her neck. Smith was one of two men convicted in the killing. The other, John Forrest Parker, was executed in 2010.
Prosecutors said the men were each paid $1,000 to kill Sennett on behalf of her pastor husband, who was deeply in debt and wanted to collect on the insurance. The husband, Charles Sennett Sr, killed himself when the investigation focused on him as a suspect, according to court documents.
Smith’s 1989 conviction was overturned, but he was convicted again in 1996. The jury recommended a life sentence by 11-1, but a judge overrode that and sentenced him to death.
Alabama no longer allows a judge to override a jury’s death penalty decision.
There were 24 executions in the United States in 2023, all of them carried out by lethal injection.
Payton Gendron murdered 10 Black people at a supermarket in New York state in 2022.
Federal prosecutors in the United States will seek the death penalty against Payton Gendron, a white supremacist who murdered 10 Black people during a livestreamed supermarket rampage in New York state.
Gendron, 20, is already serving a life sentence in prison with no chance of parole, after he pleaded guilty to state charges of murder and hate-motivated domestic terrorism in the 2022 attack in Buffalo.
In a notice announcing the decision to seek the death penalty, Trini Ross, US attorney for western New York, wrote that Gendron had selected the supermarket “in order to maximise the number of Black victims”.
The notice cited a range of factors for the decision, including the substantial planning leading to the shooting and the decision to target at least one victim who was “particularly vulnerable due to old age and infirmity”.
On May 14, 2022, the then-18-year-old Gendron, had driven from his hometown of Conklin, more than 322km (200 miles) away, wearing heavy body armour and wielding an AR-15 assault rifle.
According to prosecutors, he shot four people in the parking lot, three of them fatally, before entering the grocery store. Gendron also wore a helmet with a video camera attached and livestreamed the two-minute attack on the platform Twitch.
The dead, who ranged in age from 32 to 86, included eight customers, the store security guard and a church deacon who drove shoppers to and from the store with their groceries. Three people were wounded but survived.
On Friday, after a hearing with the federal prosecutors, relatives of the victims expressed mixed views on whether they thought the prosecutors should pursue the death penalty.
“I’m not necessarily disappointed in the decision … It would have satisfied me more knowing he would have spent the rest of his life in prison being surrounded by the population of people he tried to kill,” Mark Talley, whose 63-year-old mother Geraldine Talley was killed by Gendron, told The Associated Press.
“I would prefer he spend the rest of his life in prison suffering every day,” he added.
Several other family members of the victims left without speaking.
Death penalties in the US
Since US President Joe Biden came to power four years ago, the Department of Justice has made federal death penalty cases a rarity.
Biden, a Democrat, pledged during his campaign to support legislation to end the death penalty.
Thereafter, under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Justice Department has permitted the continuation of two capital prosecutions and withdrawn from pursuing death in more than two dozen cases. Garland also instituted a moratorium on federal executions in 2021 pending a review of procedures.
Though the moratorium does not prevent prosecutors from seeking death sentences, the Justice Department has done so sparingly.
It successfully sought the death penalty for an anti-semitic gunman who murdered 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue, which had been authorised as a death penalty case before Garland became attorney general.
Last year, it went ahead with an effort to get the death sentence against a man who killed eight people on a New York City bike path, though a lack of a unanimous jury meant that prosecution resulted in a life sentence.
But the Justice Department has declined to pursue the death penalty in other mass killings.
Three men and one woman accused of being ‘saboteurs’ were hanged for their ‘collaboration with the Zionist regime’.
Iran has executed three men and one woman who were convicted for their alleged links to Israel’s Mossad spy agency, according to media affiliated with the judiciary.
“Four members of a sabotage group related to the Zionist regime … were hanged this morning” in Iran’s northwestern province of West Azerbaijan, the judiciary’s Mizan news agency reported on Friday.
Mizan identified those executed as three men – Vafa Hanareh, Aram Omari and Rahman Parhazo – and one woman, Nasim Namazi, who were sentenced to death on charges of “moharebeh”, an Islamic legal term meaning “waging war against God”, and “corruption on Earth” through their “collaboration with the Zionist regime”, referring to Israel.
The group “committed extensive actions against the country’s security under the guidance of the Mossad”, Mizan reported.
The four were charged with kidnapping Iranian security forces to extract intelligence and were also accused of setting fire to the cars and apartments of some agents.
Several others working with the same group were each sentenced to 10 years in jail, Mizan said, without providing additional details.
Iranian intelligence put the group under surveillance for at least four months, starting in January 2022 until their arrest that May, when they were “transferred from a neighbouring country” to Iran, according to the state-run news agency IRNA.
Iran does not recognise Israel and the two countries have engaged in a shadow war for years.
On December 16, a man convicted of working for Mossad was executed in the southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan.
The Islamic republic hanged four people in December 2022 who had been convicted of collaborating with Israel’s intelligence services.
Iran accuses Israel of carrying out a wave of attacks and assassinations targeting its nuclear programme. In August, Iran accused Israel of being behind “one of the largest sabotage plots” targeting its defence industry and missile production.
According to rights groups, including Amnesty International, Iran executes more people per year than any other nation except China.
In May, United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk said Iran had an “abominable” track record of executions in 2023 with an average of more than 10 people hanged each week.
More than 600 people have been executed by Iran so far this year, already the highest figure in eight years, said the Norway-based Iran Human Rights group in a November report. In 2015, Iran carried out 972 death sentences, according to the UN.
Iran has issued death sentences and executed people detained during last year’s anti-government protests, which were triggered in September after the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old who was arrested by “morality police” in Tehran for allegedly not adhering to a mandatory dress code for women.
Jakarta, Indonesia – For more than a decade, Mary Jane Veloso has been held in a prison in the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta awaiting execution after being found guilty of drug trafficking.
This year, her family got to see her for the first time in five years.
“Mary Jane has been here in Indonesia for a very long time already. Before Mary Jane’s father and I pass away, we hope that she comes home for her children and she will be the one that takes care of her children,” her mother Celia told Al Jazeera.
“It’s been a very long time. We want her back,” she added.
Like many Filipinos, Veloso sought work overseas because the money was better than at home.
Leaving her two sons with her mother, she first went to Dubai where she spent nine months as a domestic worker.
After another household employee allegedly tried to rape her, Veloso left her job and returned home to the Philippines where she was approached by a woman named Maria Kristina Sergio who said she had a job for her in Malaysia.
Eager for another chance, Veloso accepted the offer but when she got to Malaysia, she found there was no work.
Sergio, her contact, instead suggested Veloso join her on a holiday to Indonesia, but when the women landed at Yogyakarta’s Adisutjipto Airport in April 2010, officials found 2.6kg (5.7 pounds) of heroin in 25-year-old Veloso’s suitcase.
Six months later, she was found guilty of drug trafficking and sentenced to death.
Despite a tough line on drugs by Indonesian President Joko Widodo, who was first elected in 2014, Veloso has so far managed to escape the firing squad.
Veloso’s family speaking to the media about their efforts to secure clemency earlier this year [File: Rolex Dela Pena/EPA]
She won a last-minute reprieve in 2015, when seven foreigners and an Indonesian were executed, after Sergio turned herself in to the Philippines police on allegations of people trafficking and the government in Manila under then President Benigno Aquino asked for Veloso’s case to be reviewed.
As Widodo enters his last few months in office, Veloso’s family are now hoping the outgoing president will agree to clemency for the Filipino after, in March, giving a rare pardon to another domestic worker who had also been sentenced to death.
‘Forced to go abroad’
Veloso’s supporters argue she is a victim of human trafficking.
According to the National Union of People’s Lawyers (NUPL), which is raising awareness about Veloso’s case, the drugs were “secretly stashed in a bag given to her by the brother of Tintin’s [Sergio’s] boyfriend in Malaysia without Mary Jane’s knowledge, consent or intention”.
Hailing from Nueva Ecija, north of Manila on the island of Luzon, all the women in the Veloso family were among the millions of Filipinos working overseas to provide for their families.
“Our life is very difficult, it’s very hard, we don’t have much [money] to eat,” their mother Celia Veloso explained. “That’s why we are forced to make a choice to go abroad. All of my daughters, four of them… all worked overseas”.
Mary Jane’s recruiters for the supposed job in Malaysia, Sergio and Julius Lacanilao, were found guilty in January 2020 of running an alleged illegal recruitment network and sentenced to life in prison.
Veloso has also filed a case against the pair in the same court but has been unable to give testimony because it needs to be delivered in person and she cannot do so because while being on death row in Indonesia.
“The only barrier right now for that to move forward is for both governments, both Indonesia and the Philippine government, to agree on the technicality… where this testimony will be taken,” said Joanna Concepcion, who chairs Migrante International, an organisation advocating for Veloso.
Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Teuku Faizasyah told Al Jazeera he had not followed up on the issue and referred questions to the Ministry of Law and Human Rights.
The law ministry spokesperson did not reply to Al Jazeera’s questions.
Mary Jane Veloso at a prison craft workshop in 2016 [Rana Dyandra/Antara Foto via Reuters]
Widodo and former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who took office after Aquino, shared the same hardline approach to drugs, with Duterte leading a brutal crackdown, which left thousands dead and is now the subject of an International Criminal Court investigation.
Instead of seeking clemency from Indonesia, Widodo said Duterte had given the green light for Veloso’s execution in 2015. The Philippines, which does not use capital punishment, said Duterte had said he would simply respect the judicial process.
Migrante International’s Concepcion says there does not seem to have been much of a change in approach since Ferdinand Marcos Jr took office in June 2022.
“He continues the same policy and has not publicly said that it would change anything that Duterte had done,” she said.
Indonesia and the Philippines are founding members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Indonesia was the first country Marcos Jr visited after he was elected president..
“Maybe he is playing it safe,” Concepcion added. “It was his first state visit at that time as president, so I’m sure that the agenda items that he would discuss were very carefully planned out, of what specific issues that his first state visit would focus on”.
In the first two years of Widodo’s first term, 18 people, including two women, were executed. All had been found guilty of drug offences.
Under international law, where the death penalty exists, it is supposed to be used only for the “most serious crimes”, a threshold that does not include drug crimes.
Amid widespread criticism from national, regional and global human rights defenders, there has not been an execution in Indonesia since July 2016, according to Afif Abdul Qoyim, coordinator of the Community Legal Aid Institute (LBHM), an organisation that campaigns against the death penalty.
Activists have been calling for a moratorium, but one is not formally in place.
“[The president] still can arrange an execution any time he wants, or the next government can also do it in the early part of their reign,” Afif told Al Jazeera.
Maintaining pressure
Earlier this year, Jokowi gave clemency to another female migrant worker, Merri Utami, who was almost executed in 2016.
Even though Merri Utami’s and Veloso’s cases share some similarities, Afif notes some key differences.
“One of the factors, probably, is the nationality. Merri Utami is Indonesian, while Mary Jane has a foreign nationality,” he explained, adding that Indonesia often tried to suggest that it was foreigners who were most involved in drug trafficking.
Still, Mary Jane Veloso is not losing hope.
While Marcos Jr may seem to have continued the Duterte approach to the case, on the sidelines of his visit to Indonesia, his Foreign Secretary Enrique Manalo made a request for “executive clemency” for Veloso during a meeting with his Indonesian counterpart Retno Marsudi in Jakarta.
Now Veloso’s legal team is lodging an appeal before Widodo leaves office.
“The truth is, the first clemency was to SBY [Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the Indonesian president from 2004-2014]. Mary Jane never asked clemency to Jokowi,” Veloso’s lawyer Agus Salim told Al Jazeera.
The Indonesia general election is scheduled for February 2024.
“We are going to keep pushing until Widodo formally leaves the office… We’re still hopeful that there are some actions, some development,” Concepcion said.
Veloso’s family is anxiously awaiting developments.
Her eldest son Mark Danielle is now 20 years old,
“It’s hard to grow up without my mother,” he said. “We really want to be with my mother and be able to see her every day, to see her, to hug her.”
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