A Singapore court decision to hang a Vietnamese-born Australian drug trafficker has not gone down too well in Australia. "Australia won’t punish Singapore over hanging”, said a Reuters story quoting the Australian Prime Minister John Howard. Australia won’t slap trade sanctions on Singapore or deny air rights sought by Singapore Airlines simply on this issue, he said. But the fact that Singapore has rejected Australian pleas for clemency for the 25-year-old drug smuggler, Nguyen Tuong Van, has raised some hackles. Nguyen, who was caught with 400 grams of heroin at Singapore’s Changi airport on transit from Cambodia to Australia, is to be hanged on Dec 2.

Protesters have been saying it is hypocritical of Singapore to hang a lone heroin smuggler when it is a major investor in Burma, the world’s biggest heroin supplier. I don’t know about that.

But I wonder if an Australian newspaper was being entirely fair when it said Singaporeans have been "well schooled" to go along with government decisions and not to question them. There are people who genuinely believe the government has to stand firm against drug traffickers, even if it means imposing the death penalty, as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation found, interviewing locals at a Singapore shopping mall. But there are exceptions. One Singaporean blogger has been blogging against the death sentence, I found while looking at Global Voices Online. As for the majority, they have to get on with their lives. Personally, it did not even occur to me that the decision could be questioned until I read that report, possibly in the Sydney Morning Herald. One has to respect the law of the land.

Amnesty International calculates Singapore has the highest number of executions per capita in the world , said the reporter from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (The report was picked up by the Singapore website, Little Speck.)

I checked the Amnesty site but could not find that particular statistic. This was what I found instead:

More than 3,797 people were executed in 25 countries and at least 7,395 were sentenced to death in 64 countries last year, Amnesty International reported earlier this year. China executed at least 3,400 people, Iran executed at least 159, and Viet Nam at least 64. There were 59 executions in the USA, down from 65 in 2003. Togther they accounted for 97 per cent of all the death penalties.

Five countries last year abolished the death penalty — Bhutan, Greece, Samoa, Senegal and Turkey. So far, 121 countries have abolished the death penalty in law or practice while 75 others retain and use the death penalty.

Significantly, the only South-east Asian countries which have abolished the death sentence are the ones devastated by war — Cambodia and East Timor. Brunei is described as "abolitionist in practice", meaning its laws provide for the death penalty only in exceptional circumstances. All the others — Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Laos  — retain capital punishment.