October 25, 2005
The impending execution of Nguyen Tuong Van is a travesty of justice and a failure of diplomacy, writes Mark Baker.
AT DAWN on a Friday soon a young Australian will be taken from his death-row cell in the grey colonial pile of Singapore's Changi Prison, fitted with a hood and noose and dropped to oblivion through a gallows trapdoor. A few hours later his broken body will be handed back to his family.
In the island metropolis to our north, a place that admires itself through a polished veneer of modernity and sophistication, the city-state's brand of justice will be delivered with all the subtlety and compassion of the Middle Ages.
Yet few beyond his family, friends and dogged legal team are likely to mourn the passing of Nguyen Tuong Van, convicted heroin trafficker. As one of his Melbourne lawyers, Julian McMahon, observed despairingly at the weekend, Nguyen is not the kind of pretty young Anglo-Saxon damsel whose distress ignites national indignation.
But there are good reasons Australians should be alarmed and angered by the impending execution of the 25-year-old former Melbourne salesman — and why they should be demanding a much more vigorous response from the Federal Government to the final rejection of his plea for clemency than the limp resignation we are now witnessing from John Howard and Alexander Downer.
In short, Nguyen is to be hanged on a pretext that flouts the principles, if not the letter, of international law, after a flawed trial and after a comprehensive diplomatic snub that makes a mockery of the supposedly close political, defence and business friendship between Singapore and Australia.
Nguyen was arrested at Changi Airport in December 2002 after a routine security check revealed 396 grams of heroin strapped to his body and hidden in his hand luggage. Under Singapore law — the harshest in Asia — anyone found with more than 15 grams of heroin is deemed a trafficker and the mandatory sentence is death.
Canberra's increasing ambivalence about capital punishment surely undermined the credibility of its argument.But the verdict that Nguyen was trafficking into Singapore is a nonsense. He was arrested in the airport transit lounge while preparing to board a plane for the second leg of a journey from Cambodia to Australia. He had not passed through Singapore immigration and he had no intention of entering Singapore. Even neighbouring Malaysia — which has hanged three Australians for drug trafficking since the 1980s — acknowledges a legal distinction between people who formally enter a country and those who are merely in transit (those found with drugs in transit face a relatively modest jail sentence).
Nguyen's lawyers did not pursue this obvious defence because the Singapore courts — which adopt the airs and trappings of their British colonial ancestry but are in practice a deeply politicised law unto themselves — have flatly refused such arguments in the past.
The trial itself and the subsequent failed appeal were also flawed. The judges ignored evidence that might well have brought an acquittal in the Australian courts, or other properly independent jurisdictions.
The Singapore judges ignored evidence that the arresting and investigating police had themselves broken the law by denying Nguyen Australian consular support before he was interrogated, and had failed to secure the evidentiary drugs that showed significant and unexplained variations when weighed at different times. No action was taken against a senior police officer who gave contradictory testimony.
The trial judge also brushed aside a compelling defence argument that mandatory death sentences — which have helped create a world's-worst-practice of 400 people executed in Singapore since the early 1990s — are a violation of international human rights standards.
Singapore's mandatory sentencing regime also meant no consideration could be given to mitigating circumstances or the character of the defendant. And there was plenty that should have been heard.
Born in a refugee camp in Thailand and raised by a struggling single mother in Melbourne, Nguyen was not a drug addict, a drug trader or even an avaricious "mule" for a drug syndicate. Naive and desperate, he was pressured into making the trip to Cambodia to repay substantial debts owed by his twin brother to loan sharks. Nguyen and his family were threatened before he left Australia.
In the end, Singapore's uncompromising policy on mandatory sentencing made a conviction virtually inevitable, but last week's failure of the petition for a presidential pardon — Nguyen's last lifeline — has raised more disturbing issues.
While the Federal Government gave strenuous support to the application for a pardon, including a personal plea by Howard to Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong during a visit to Singapore earlier this year, Canberra's increasing ambivalence about capital punishment surely undermined the credibility of its argument.
What is left of principle when one day Australia's Government cheers the death penalty for Bali bombers, on another its police assist in sending accused drug runners to face the death penalty abroad and the next it tries to argue against a hanging on humanitarian grounds?
The refusal of a pardon to Nguyen, dictated by the Singapore cabinet, now stands as a stinging diplomatic rebuff to Howard personally and Australia as a whole. And this from a nation that is supposed to be our best friend in South-East Asia and the neighbour with which we have the strongest strategic, commercial and personal links.
The Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister now solemnly shake their heads and lament there is nothing more that can be done. But there is plenty that can be done by Australians who believe state-sanctioned killing — however odious the crime — has no place in a civilised society.
They can boycott Singapore-owned companies such as Optus and Singapore Airlines, they can take their shopping holidays elsewhere, they can protest against the thousands of Singapore military who train on Australian soil and they can start flying to Europe via Bangkok — not a bad idea when a visit to the transit lounge at Changi Airport can finish in a cell at Changi prison.
Mark Baker is opinion editor. He was Asia editor, based in Singapore, from 2001 to 2004 and reported the arrest and trial of Nguyen Tuong Van.
7 comments:
Hey if those white Aussies don't give a damn or can't even grow some calcium in their backbones, then why should their government, or even a foreign country that's got every right to apply the laws of their land?
I bet the majority of them Aussies don't even know about this, didn't bother to, or are likely thinking, "no loss there, just one less immigrant. And he's yellow." So much for pro-human-rights Australia. Bullshit. I mean, just compare the amount of publicities those two white bitches got, caught in Bali, with this guy who's gonna hang soon.
Or maybe the Aussies should just clean up their own poppy-infested backyards and educate their own drugheads first, before deriding sovereign countries and their "Middle Ages" laws. I mean if you're at it, why not bitch about your ally, George W. Bush? He's never been one to shy away from death penalties either. Or even your own godamn country! Human rights? BS again! Last I read, Australia had troops participating in the 'liberation of Iraq' too; their very own refugees 'concentration camps' Down Under; and even exiling immigrants. I didn't hear any brouhaha then.
Dude, sovereign nations don't demarcate borders for fun, y'know? If you think you can bring the rules and 'principles' of your land, on your Union Jack-assed passport, maybe you also want to hoist the flag, don a colonial wig, crack a whip, swig some beers, and burn down the ship with whatever shit you're smoking, for being ignorant.
True. The death penalty sucked. But you never hear Aussies--or any other countries for that matter--complaining much when it's not one of their own getting it. Grow a spine. At least the Singapore government don't expect any less and whine like you lot when one of their own flout the law in a foreign country.
"Dude, sovereign nations don't demarcate borders for fun, y'know?"
Good point.
Bush have no right to invade Iraq and Afghanistan.
Groups like Amnesty have no right to advocate human rights in countries like Singapore.
Capiltalists have no right to hawk their wares in other countries.
The United Nations should not make decisions that interfere in other nations.
There should be an absolute policy of non-interference.
Let the North Koreans starve. Let countries handle their own natural disasters. Let civil wars in Africa go on..
The list goes on ..
In the article by Mark Baker, it was said, "Nguyen and his family were threatened before he left Australia." If this was indeed so, my question is: Was his mother aware that her son was about to embark on this highly risky and illegal venture?
It doesn't make any sense for foreigners to complain, since we singaporeans have never uttered as much as you guys when our fellow citizens broke the law and have to face the punishemnt. If you can't take the law, then go elsewhere. Can't accept such laws so you bring up political ties!? wow... the least you cna do is to pay some respect to the country. What do you think singapore is?
Singapore is unique.
I think your guys are getting it all wrong here. The question is not to let Nguyen get away for his crime but to commute the medieval and barbaric death sentence to a prison term. The answers I have read so far are typical for the brainwashed, docile and submissive average Singaporean, who still haven't got it what human rights are all about. They still haven't grasped the fact that while small "fish" drug runners are sentenced to death, their own government entertains business dealings with those drug cartels these drugs are coming from. What really sucks here is the mockery of the law and the hyprocracy of the judicial system being exercised. I still remember the grassroot leader who poisoned a person and got away with 3 years, while another who embezzled money to nurture his gambling addiction got 42 years. There is something principally very wrong here in this country, where a financial crime is considered more severe than a murder. So don't talk here about your national feelings you don't seem to know about. Just remember: it's easy to condemn another person, but the next time it could be you or a family member sitting on death row.
In life anything can happen to anyone at any time. If you believe in fate, as I do, then fate will deal you the cards, and if you happen to be unlucky and get into a sticky situation that results in you suddenly "sitting on death row", many people from certain cultures would stoically accept that as their fate... They are fatalistic by nature and would accept their situation with a certain stoicism. As an analogy, I remember listening to a documentary on the BBC World Service some months ago about so-called "death houses" in India. These are places in the countryside where people who feel that they are ready to meet their maker -- because of some terminal illness -- would go to and wait quietly lying on a bed at peace with themselves, for probably days, before the end arrived. The documentary then juxtaposed that approach against how Westerners, especially Americans, would behave instead: for them, they would desperately seek all forms of modern medicine to cure their illness to forestall the inevitability and prolong their life. Which cultural norm is "correct" here? Who takes it upon him or herself to judge the sanctity of life? Personally, as an Asian, I am not against capital punishment per se, but I think it should be left to the judge -- considering all the evidence and mitigating circumstances, if any -- to decide on whether a convicted person deserved that ultimate sanction. I don't quite like anything which is mandatory. At the same time, the whole issue related to the case of Mr Nguyen is regrettably caught up in larger dynamics. What has been forgotten in all this is that Michael McCrea, a person accused of 2 gruesome murders in Singapore, was finally extradited to Singapore from Australia but on one condition IMPOSED by Australia, that whatever the outcome of his trial, he would not face the death penalty. I rather doubt that many Singaporeans would be thrilled if another case is, so soon after, seemingly settled on terms imposed yet again by that same foreign government. Finally, on how juiciaries operate, take the example of the United States: there have been volumes of studies which concretely prove that if you are a non-White person charged with some crime -- especially a capital offence -- your chances of a fair trial are reduced considerably. Hence the wry joke of African-American motorists whenever they are stopped by police patrol cars: they were caught "Driving while black". This is the mosaic nature of the world we live in. We have to take it for what it is, and not how we would like it to be...
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