Singapore has sentenced a drug suspect to death at a court hearing held on the videoconferencing app Zoom because of the city-state’s COVID-19 lockdown, in a decision criticized by a human rights group as callous and inhumane.
Defense lawyer Peter Fernando said the Singaporean Supreme Court announced the penalty to his client, Punithan Genasan of Malaysia, in a virtual hearing on Friday last week.
Genasan was in jail, while Fernando and prosecutors participated in the hearing from different locations.
A spokesperson said that courts have been conducting hearings and delivering judgements remotely to minimize the spread of the coronavirus.
The spokesperson, who declined to be identified under court policy, confirmed that Genasan’s case was the first “where a death sentence was pronounced by remote hearing in Singapore.”
Singapore is not the first nation to do so. Human Rights Watch said that a man in Nigeria was also sentenced to death via Zoom earlier this month, reportedly for murder.
“This has been the arrangement made by the court ... with essential hearings conducted via Zoom. We have no complaints,” Fernando said on Wednesday.
He said he would meet Genasan today to discuss an appeal.
The court ruled that Genasan, 37, was involved in drug trafficking in October 2011.
Court documents showed the judge found that he recruited two drug couriers, and directed them to transport and deliver 28.5g of heroin.
Singapore applies the death penalty to a range of offenses, including drug trafficking, murder, kidnapping, waging war against the government and use of firearms.
Human Rights Watch said the death penalty is already cruel and inhumane.
“It’s shocking the prosecutors and the court are so callous that they fail to see that a man facing capital punishment should have the right to be present in court to confront his accusers,” Human Rights Watch deputy Asia director Phil Robertson said.
He said it raised concerns about why Singapore is rushing to conclude the case via Zoom.
Amnesty International urged Singapore to abolish capital punishment altogether.
“At a time when the global attention is focused on saving and protecting lives in a pandemic, the pursuit of the death penalty is all the more abhorrent,” Amnesty International death penalty adviser Chiara Sangiorgio said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion