Bangkok.- Singapore continues to execute people condemned for drug trafficking at an accelerated pace with which it may break its own record of 2025 this year, when it executed 17 people, according to NGOs, ignoring the criticism of the international community and going against the current of neighboring countries.
The authorities of the prosperous city-state have executed five people this year, including a Malaysian citizen, in a small island nation with 3,200 inmates incarcerated for violating its draconian anti-drug trafficking laws, according to official figures.
This is a fast pace that follows the line of the previous year, when the previous record of executions -13- was surpassed, which groups like Amnesty International were aware of: according to the NGOs that monitor hangings through family members, 17 people were executed in 2025, while the authorities recognize 15.
The semi-autocratic island defends executions, in contrast to other Southeast Asian countries, which have either reduced their use in recent years or have taken steps towards abolition.
An Unstoppable System
Singaporean Kirsten Han, director of the Mekong Review and one of the best-known anti-death penalty activists on the small island, told EFE that there is no official explanation for the acceleration of executions, which is happening while the European Union (EU) delegation in the country has asked to stop them, supporting the alert issued in January by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
"We haven't seen any official explanation for their acceleration. I have the feeling that they are carrying out (executions) so quickly simply because they can," Han pointed out.
Governed by the People's Action Party (PAP) since its independence from Malaysia in 1965, the island has since defended a model that combines economic openness with the oppression of freedoms and rigid laws in order to preserve security.
After decades of rule by the Lee dynasty (Lee Kuan Yew, known as the "father of the nation", and his son Lee Hsien Loong), the financial center and one of the countries with the highest GDP per capita in the world has been governed since 2024 by Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, also of the PAP.
Under his command, the island "has not shown any sign of changing the policy on executions," warned Human Rights Watch last year, while representatives of his government defend the death penalty in public.
The director of Singapore's anti-narcotics agency, Sebastian Tan, stated this month that the drug circulation problem remains stable in the nation, but defended the use of capital punishment for "the most serious crimes": in cases where trafficking exceeds 15 grams of heroin or half a kilo of marijuana, as stipulated by local law.
"We cannot risk the normalization of drug use," the official insisted, cited in the agency's annual report, which accounts for 1,165 arrests in 2025.
Against the Current
So far this year, the EU has twice called for a halt to executions in Singapore, reminding that there are no studies to support the death penalty as a deterrent to crime.
"We advocate for Singapore to adopt a moratorium on all executions as a first step towards their total abolition, in line with the global trend," say the Brussels statements, in line with what was expressed in January by the UN.
According to United Nations data, some 170 countries have abolished the death penalty or introduced a suspension of executions, although these increased in a dozen nations in 2025, driven among other reasons by the harshness of anti-drug laws.
In the region, neighboring Malaysia abolished mandatory death penalty in 2023 and its government is moving towards full abolition; Indonesia marks a decade without executions this year, which is interpreted as a de facto moratorium; and Thailand has not executed since 2018.
Burma, in conflict, impoverished and under the control of a military junta since the 2021 coup, which reactivated executions in 2022 after decades without carrying them out, stands out on the opposite side.
In the case of prosperous and futuristic Singapore, the island maintains the gallows as the sole method for executions, which occur opaquely and normally at dawn in the island prison of Changi, according to activists and the families of the prisoners.
The NGO Transformative Justice Collective believes that Singapore "urgently needs to rethink its approach to drugs and adopt one based on healthcare," it told EFE.
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