Clemency
Within weeks, in the truest display of cold-hearted Singaporean efficiency, a 25 year old Australian-Vietnamese man will be hanged. Yes, hanged. Is it cheaper to hang someone than to rehabilitate, or keep around in jail for a year? We don’t shoot people here. We just go one little step up and hang them.
Nguyen, at 25, was born in the same year as my brother, whom I love dearly. I can only imagine how much closer he is to his own twin, whom he was purportedly trying to help. If my brother had chalked up debts from a Vietnamese gang in Melbourne, I would do anything, believe me.
It doesn’t in any way vindicate him for his folly in bringing .396kg of heroin to Singapore, even if it was just for a stopover (my goodness, he should have taken the road to Bangkok, then flown to Australia from there). Yet there is something fundamentally wrong about the death penalty; and even more when we, as a small city-state, are trigger/noose-happy in executing the number of people per capita that we do.
Drugs are wrong. Trafficking drugs is wrong. There is no way a state-sanctioned murder can be right, either, even if you were to suppose this were performed in the deterrence of the possible deaths this person’s act may have possibly caused. In all my optimism I am hoping the bureaucracy and its proponents will see the situation as we all do: not as a matter of absolute rights and wrongs, not as a matter of a white nation seeking extra-territorial gains, but as a matter of flesh and blood and basic human dignity.
- Posted by popagandhi at 03:22 pm
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Hey I’d like to know how ‘valid’ this site is. Will the big brothers up there acknowledge this? I’ve heard of this case and I genuinely hope his case would have a better outcome. I am very interested to sign the petition.
And what in it’s place?
“When asked why he did not know exactly how many people had been executed this year, Goh replied: “I have got more important issues to worry about.” – Think Centre
The bureaucracy won’t see things the way we do (talk about democracy!) because they don’t care. If you don’t contribute to the country’s economics or renown, get outta here. That’s what they’re like. (and now i better bloody save my ass my saying this is my personal opinion and i’m entitled to it)
oops, typo by saying..
And then the drugs he supplies are going to kill other people’s brothers and sisters.
Yeah we’re all just puppets of western liberalism, apparently, without any regard for the collective good.
What a crock of bull. All they care about is that we agree entirely with them.
A group is having a meeting and hopefully garner enough presence to make a difference:
7th November – Monday
7pm – 11pm
Hotel Asia – along Scotts Road
There will be speakers there…
what about human rights in the usa? lethal injection, electrocution and even employing firing squads?
the death penalty isn’t humane, that’s for sure, but that is not to say it doesn’t work. i think compared to other countries, the rate of drug trafficking in singapore is significantly lower, and to be honest, i wouldn’t want to stay in country that doesn’t take crime seriously.
i hate the hypocrisy of the australian media when it comes to issues like this, especially after the whole schappelle corby incident in bali. bali, for one, isn’t under australia’s govern, and australia does not have every right to dictate how other countries rule, simply because it sees itself as a white/human rights power.
what’s even worse is the public’s response to the issue, fancy wanting to cancel their tsunami aid donation.
i wonder if anyone remembered chika honda, and how the australian government treated the whole issue. what about human rights to citizens of other nationalities then? do i even have to bring up how australia refused entry to refugees seeking for asylum? hypocrisy sure stinks.
The media’s got their own set of idiosyncrasies, and nobody really trusts the media these days do we? If Australia media is hypocratical, could Singapore be any worse?
No one’s talking about human rights in the USA. If hanging in Singapore is wrong, so it is in the States. Amnesty is trying hard to end the death penalty there as well, just as it is trying to appeal against the death sentence in Singapore. Why bring in the States, where hundreds have been found to be wrongly hanged? We’re talking about Singapore here.
Our good man, Johnnie boy (i’m a leftie here btw) has already stated that Bali is a sovereign state and he will not intefere with whatever happens there. The matter at hand is the death penalty and Singapore’s unwavering stance on legalised murder. Death. It’s about death, not punishment. Has it worked? For the last 15 years or so, over 400 people have been hanged in Singapore. That number is huge by any standards but has it stopped criminal activity from occuring?
At the last count more than 65% of Australians are in favour of the death penalty. What the Australian government and the Australian Labor Party are attempting to articulate is not so much much the opinion of the Australian public. Instead, it is about values and ideologies. It is about the belief in the dignity of every life. The Government and the Australian Labor Party is attempting to project a humane vision of the future. If history is any indicator, then we should expect the public’s mentality to shift as each generation passes, to a point where everyone values the intrinsic worth of every life.
The argument that the Australian government should not intervene because of hypocrisy, is flawed. Which of you dare say that you have never been guilty of hypocrisy? Does that mean that we should not then advise others the right course of action, even if we believe it to be true? Does that mean that we should not articulate an argument about our beliefs, even though as humans we sometimes fail to live up to our ideal self?
If that is so, there would still be slavery, and in Australia the White Australian policy would still be in place. Most people are by nature conservative and prefer the status-quo. Without the few in society and in Government articulating a better future, we will all live in a stagnant society.
If people are not able to articulate an ideal vision and governments are unable to put pressure on foreign nations, communism would not have fell so quickly, if it fell at all; apartheid would not have receded as quickly as it did in S. Africa.
It is important to dare to articulate your beliefs and world-views even if sometimes you are unable to live up to it sometimes. After, that’s why they are called ideals. There is, and will always be a gap between our true self and our ideal self.
Regards,
Thaddeus Lin
Australian Young Labor
National Executive
A fine situation this is – that is, our general state of affairs.
i guess they will one day learn, never to take a passing route through Singapore for trafficking, be caught anywhere else in the world, and they would have a higher probability of being spared.
I am more for letting them understand what’s living hell for life imprisonment, then to be hanged. We really should give the guy a living chance – a lifetime for him to reflect on how many people he could have killed with the 396kg of heroin.
That would have been much more torturous then dying in the gutters.
It was .396kg; 396g. But it makes no difference.