Just a few months later, however, the same government started backtracking on its promise, citing a lack of public support for abolition as a key reason for this choice.

This deference to public opinion is not exceptional. Rather, public support is often used as a central justification for pursuing populist policies, including violent drug wars and the death penalty. While examples of populist anti-drug campaigns can be found around the world, in some extreme cases— such as Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines—these campaigns have triggered calls for the use or reintroduction of capital punishment as a tool of drug control. This stands in contrast with an established global trend of moving away from the death penalty for drug offenses, as recorded by Harm Reduction international.

A closer look at developments in these countries raises the question: what does the public really think about the death penalty for drug offenses?

In an effort to better understand these phenomena, Harm Reduction International recently analyzed a selection of 39 valid public opinion surveys conducted in 5 key countries in Asia—a region that holds 16 of the 35 countries which still retain the death penalty for drug offenses. This included surveys from China, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, and the Philippines.

From this analysis, we learnt that public support for capital punishment, both in general and for drug offenses specifically, is much more complex and nuanced than often depicted.

Public support for the death penalty appears to be based on a belief in the deterrent potential of capital punishment, and in the conviction that the criminal justice system works perfectly. If and when the public learns otherwise, and especially when it learns of the many people who are wrongfully convicted or executed, support drops significantly.

Public support for the death penalty also appears to be “abstract”, almost a gut feeling: while most respondents claimed to support the death penalty in theory, people were much more measured in their views when presented with real-life scenarios. This suggests that when faced with the human cost of capital punishment, the public may exercise more caution and be more reluctant to support the death penalty.

This is particularly true for drug-law violations. Surveys that asked respondents to express their support for the death penalty as a punishment for real-life drug cases never registered a majority of support. In the four surveys which presented respondents with the real-life case of a woman drug courier caught at the airport, support dropped to well under 20 percent.

Finally, these surveys reveal that the public actually tends to know very little and has little interest in the death penalty. While the majority expresses support for this measure, the strength of such support is invariably limited. In other words, the death penalty simply is not a priority issue for the public — unless intentionally made so by media and government campaigns.

These findings ultimately confirm that drug offenses are a strategic entry point towards the complete abolition of the death penalty: support for capital punishment is lower for non-violent offenses, the lack of unique deterrent effect is clear with regard to drug offenses, and some surveys even found that capital punishment was the least preferred response to drug trafficking.

Photo of a street in Beijing, China; by Nggsc via Wikimedia Commons

The post The Death Penalty for Drugs: What Public Opinion Surveys in Asia Teach Us appeared first on Filter.

Zulfiqar Ali had spent the last 13 years of his life awaiting execution in Indonesia when he died from cancer in June at the age of 54, alone in an Indonesian hospital more than 3,000 miles away from his home in Lahore, Pakistan.

It didn’t matter that he’d been wrongfully convicted of possessing 300 grams of heroin, that he was long denied legal assistance, coerced into confessing and tortured—or that Indonesia’s president promised to grant him clemency in 2018. Ali still died convicted, after languishing for more than a decade in inhuman prison conditions.  

Ali’s story is not exceptional. Up to 40,000 people around the world are estimated to be on death row. For many of them, their rights are violated and they await execution, sometimes for years, in a constant state of anguish, uncertainty and physical and psychological suffering; UN bodies recognize such conditions as a form of inhumane treatment, if not torture.

Many prisoners endure particularly cruel forms of physical and psychological violence: from sexual abuse, to confinement in dark rooms, to being kept next to the gallows so that they can hear executions taking place.

The death penalty is not only cruel and barbaric–it is also illegal under international law when imposed for non-violent crimes, such as drug-law violations. Yet a significant number of individuals on death row worldwide are convicted–sometimes wrongfully–of drug-related crimes.

According to our latest research, at least 45 per cent of death-row prisoners in Indonesia, for example–a country with severe prison overcrowding–are awaiting execution for drug crimes. The numbers were 75 individuals out of 165 facing execution in 2017.

A similar proportion has been reported for Thailand, while it’s as high as 60 percent in Malaysia (although welcome breaking news suggests that Malaysia is now poised to abolish the death penalty).

In recent years, there has been significant progress on this issue. Several countries have adopted positive judicial reforms, and the number of reported annual executions for drug crimes has decreased by over 90 percent from 2015 to the first nine months of 2018.

But the core problem remains. Courts around the world continue to hand down death sentences to mostly low-level couriers for drug possession, trafficking and smuggling. Hundreds of people in this category remain on death row today. Unless there is total abolition of the death penalty, their execution remains a possibility at any time; any change in government, policy, or public opinion may immediately trigger their deaths.

The World Day Against the Death Penalty on October 10, organized every year by the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty (WCADP)–of which Harm Reduction International is a member–is a chance to push back against capital punishment.

This year’s theme is to shed light on the cruel and inhuman conditions that many endure on death row, and the impact this has on prisoners, their families and even their lawyers. In many countries, death rows are found in severely overcrowded and understaffed prisons with notoriously poor sanitary conditions. In other cases, people awaiting execution are kept in solitary confinement for indefinite periods of time, denied essential medicines, or even shackled or kept in cages.

Many prisoners endure particularly cruel forms of physical and psychological violence: from sexual abuse, to confinement in dark rooms, to being kept next to the gallows so that they can hear executions taking place. It is not rare for people only to be informed of their imminent execution at the last minute.

Human beings, no matter the crime or the sentence, never lose their fundamental rights and should never lose their dignity when they are in prison. The world is thankfully trending toward abolition of the death penalty, but until it is achieved in every country, the abuses and violations will continue.

To find out more about this year’s World Day against the Death Penalty and to find local initiatives, visit the World Coalition’s website.

To learn more about Zulfiqar Ali’s case, see here.

The post Dignity on Death Row: One Man Among 40,000 Awaiting Execution appeared first on Filter.