SINGAPORE'S ROUGH JUSTICE

There is a strong temptation to assume that economically successful
countries that look superficially advanced must share Canada's
respect for due process and the civil treatment of criminals.
Singapore reminded us last week -- with its execution of Australian
drug trafficker Nguyen Tuong Van, who was caught with heroin at the
Singapore airport -- that such assumptions are not always valid.

It should scarcely have come as a shock to the rest of the world that
Singapore would be prepared to hang a man for the crime of
transporting narcotics. The country generally keeps a tight handle on
its people, requiring them to seek a police permit before having a
public gathering of more than four individuals and vigourously
punishing such minor crimes as littering. More pointedly, Singapore
has put to death more than 100 people convicted of drug crimes since
1999. According to Amnesty International, the country has the highest
per-capita execution rate in the world.

As Sinapan Samydoari, a Singaporean human rights advocate, explained
to the Voice of America, "it's a very disproportionate way of dealing
with the [drug] issue, by killing a person."

Understandably, Australia fought the execution of one of its
nationals, and Australian officials, including the Prime Minister,
urged the Singaporean government not to go ahead with the death
penalty in Nguyen's case. The Australian Attorney-General even went
so far as to label the then-impending execution "barbaric." But it
was to no avail since Singapore no doubt knew that Australia would
not follow through with punitive measures -- a fact that Australian
Prime Minister John Howard has confirmed.

Since the news of Nguyen's death sentence reached the ears of
horrified Westerners, there has been a movement afoot both to protest
Nguyen's execution and to make him out to be some sort of figure of martyrdom.

Certainly Singapore should be made to pay a price for its brutality.
A tourism boycott would be an effective tool, and human rights
organizations could organize a campaign designed to embarass the
country's vain and authoritarian leadership. But the attempts to
deify Nguyen take it too far. Nguyen was a convicted heroin
trafficker, someone who knowingly broke the laws of his own and other
countries in order to profit off people's deadly addictions. The man
did not deserve to die for his crimes, but he is hardly a suitable
candidate for a poster boy in the fight against the inhumanity of
Singaporean justice.