Although court proceedings have temporarily come to a halt, urgent efforts undertaken by lawyers, activists, as well as regional and international human rights and drug policy organisations are still underway to #SaveNagaenthran.
Since finding out about Nagaenthran’s COVID-19 positive reading, the Singapore Prison Service has reported that more than 200 people across all prison facilities, including inmates and staff members, have been found to be COVID-19 positive. In response to the Malaysian Prime Minister’s appeal for leniency on “humanitarian grounds”, Singapore’s Prime Minister and foreign minister have conveyed to their Malaysian counterparts that Nagaenthran was “accorded full due process of the law”. Similarly, in response to the United Nation’s urgent appeal, an envoy has claimed that Nagaenthran “was of borderline intellectual functioning but did not suffer from mild intellectual disability.” He also argued that it is every country's "sovereign right" to decide the use of capital punishment "considering its own circumstances and in accordance with its international law obligations".
However, public opinion appears to be at odds with the Singapore government’s viewpoint. Besides provoking widespread international condemnation from human rights groups to European Union representatives and British entrepreneur Richard Branson, Nagaenthran’s death sentence has also been intensifying the debate around the death penalty in Singapore. “I never felt strongly against the death penalty, but this was the first case where I felt like it was morally unjust to carry out an execution,” said Deepthi Krishnan, a 19-year-old law student who came to watch the appeal hearing. She also observed that many young Singaporeans have more liberal views on the death penalty than their parents’ generation, and her classmates are closely following the case. Similarly, in an online poll posted on the Facebook page SG Opposition, over 600 people responded with their thoughts on the capital punishment, with more than 400 people voting that they did not agree with Nagaenthran’s death sentence.
Singapore’s death penalty laws have also once again been put on the international spotlight, with newspapers such as Al Jazeera, The Wall Street Journal and NDTV reporting on Nagaenthran’s plight. Amnesty International has released a petition to save Nagaenthran from the gallows, which they are encouraging the public to sign. In the appeal letter, they urged the President to halt Nagaenthrans’ execution, citing that “there are grave concerns that there have been multiple violations of international human rights law and standards in his case, which would render his execution unlawful.” The human rights organisation also reminds us that:
“International law and standards set out restrictions to the use of the death penalty to protect against the arbitrary deprivation of life. These include the prohibitions to impose this punishment as a mandatory sentence; for offences that do not meet the threshold of the “most serious crimes” involving intentional killing; on people with mental or intellectual disabilities; and after proceedings that do not meet the highest standards for a fair trial. Violations of all these safeguards appear present in Nagaenthran K Dharmalingam’s case and all plans to execute him must immediately stop.”
Moreover, members of the Arts community, including writers, musicians, and artists, are demonstrating their solidarity by co-signing a clemency appeal letter to the President and Cabinet of Singapore. The letter writes:
"As creators of art, we believe deeply in the importance of identifying our common humanity, developing empathy, and ensuring that every person in our society is afforded dignity, including the most downtrodden among us ... what is urgently needed is the creation of a more robust and equitable system, one that will attend to the needs of the disenfranchised and vulnerable in ways that will prevent their exploitation. What is essential also is the preservation of strong bonds and relations among family members, peers, and the community — that which may be weakened and ruined by death."
Environmental advocacy group Speak for Climate, has also stood in solidarity with Nagaenthran. In an IG post, they emphasised that climate justice and transformative justice are intrinsically intertwined, as both movements center those at the margins who are in precarious situations. They assert that cycles of harm can only be broken by understanding the “violence behind the violence”, rather than treating marginalised folks as disposable. Hence, they emphasise the need for a regenerative culture which sees every life as inherently worth caring for. “As environmentalists, we also advocate against environmental injustice. This should extend to people on death row, who are often locked up in toxic, suffocating and disabling environments. For the last 12+ years, Nagaenthran was locked up in a single cell for 23 hours a day, and his mental health has severely deteriorated during that time,” they explained.
Furthermore, a statement concerning Nagaenthran’s death impending execution was released by persons with disabilities a few days ago, and has since been co-signed by 40 disability advocacy organisations from all around the world. In their statement, We Who Witness submitted that the central issue is not Naga’s exact medical diagnosis or whether he met certain tests to qualify for ‘abnormality of mind’ that would excuse him from mental responsibility for his actions. Instead, they emphasise that what matters is the lack of procedural accommodations that facilitate effective access to justice for persons with disabilities.
We Who Witness further elucidates in their statement:
“The CRPD Committee is of the opinion that the duty to refrain from imposing the death penalty on persons with intellectual or psychosocial disability is grounded on the disproportionate and discriminatory denial of fair trial guarantees and procedural accommodations to them.
Singapore itself has acknowledged the importance of procedural accommodations. But Singapore’s version of justice facilitators, the Appropriate Adult Scheme, did not exist in 2009, when Nagaenthran was interrogated by the police. The Straits Times reported in 2015 about the importance of the Appropriate Adult Scheme, where a volunteer with the scheme was quoted as saying that the programme is important because persons whom the scheme seeks to support “can easily agree to accusations” because they are “fearful of police or other authority figures”. This casts doubt as to whether it is fair or even just reasonable to take Nagaenthran’s confessions during his initial police investigation as his most authoritative statement.”
“For Nagaenthran, there was a lack and even total absence of procedural accommodation accorded to him from the start, both when interrogated by the police and in the courtroom. This means that he was denied true due process based on current best practices about access to justice for persons with disabilities, and even by Singapore’s own current standards.”
This is corroborated by Stephanie McLennan, Senior Asia Initiatives Manager at Human Rights Watch, who mentioned that Nagaenthran received no “disability-specific accommodations” during his investigation and trial, a violation of international law. In the same vein, abolitionist Kirsten Han highlighted that there “isn’t a binary between formal diagnosis and being in a state where we can project our thought processes and reasoning onto Nagen if we don’t have the same impairments. The fact remains that Nagen has borderline intellectual functioning and that this affects the way he understands things, reacts to them, and makes his decisions. There are also concerns about his current mental state.”
I encourage all of you not to be dispirited by what Singapore’s mainstream media outlets are reporting, but to take heart in knowing that the international community is on our side!
“The work is to believe that there is a chance until there is none. That is not naivety, not optimism, but a form of discipline to do everything we can until we can't." - Kokila Annamalai, anti- death penalty activist.