In its annual report, Harm Reduction International says at least 467 drug-related executions were carried out last year.
At least 467 people were executed for drug crimes in 2023, a new record, according to Harm Reduction International (HRI), an NGO that has tracked 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 over 2022,” HRI said in its report. , which was released on Tuesday.
Drug executions accounted for about 42 percent of all known death sentences carried out worldwide last year, he added.
HRI said it had confirmed drug-related executions in countries including Iran, Kuwait and Singapore. China treats data on the death penalty as a state secret, and secrecy surrounds the penalty in countries such as Vietnam and North Korea.
“Information gaps remain on death sentences, meaning that many (if not most) of the death sentences imposed in 2023 remain unknown,” the report says. “In particular, precise figures cannot be provided for China, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Thailand. “All of these countries are believed to periodically impose a significant number of death sentences for drug crimes.”
International law prohibits the use of the death penalty for crimes that are unintentional and “more serious” in nature. The United Nations has stressed that drug-related crimes do not meet that threshold.
Singapore has received international criticism after resuming the use of the death penalty in March 2022, after a two-year pause during the pandemic.
About 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 convicted of drug trafficking in 2018. She was the first woman to be executed in the city-state in nearly 20 years.
“Singapore reversed the COVID-19 pause on executions, putting the death row machinery into overdrive,” Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in the organization's annual report. “The government’s revitalized use of the death penalty simply highlighted its disregard for human rights protections and the cruelty inherent in capital punishment.”
Some countries have taken steps to reform their death penalty regimes in recent years: Malaysia ended the mandatory death penalty, including for drugs, and Pakistan removed the death penalty from the list of punishments that can be imposed for certain violations of its Narcotic Substances Control Law. .
Still, in other countries defendants continued to be sentenced to death for drug crimes.
HRI said such sentences confirmed last year increased by more than 20 percent from 2022. About half of them were handed down by courts in Vietnam and a quarter in Indonesia.
As of the end of 2023, some 34 countries still maintain the death penalty for drug-related crimes.
In Singapore, there are just over 50 people on death row and all but two convicted of drug offences, according to Transformative Justice Collective, a Singapore-based NGO that campaigns against the death penalty.
On February 28, Singapore hanged Bangladeshi citizen 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 serious harm to the victim or society,” Singapore Police said in a statement.
