ABSTRACT
On 2 December 2005, Vietnamese-born Australian national Van Tuong Nguyen, aged 25, was hanged in Changi Prison, Singapore. Van Nguyen was arrested in Changi airport in 2002 after being found in possession of 396 grams of heroin – more than twenty-fi ve times the amount that mandates a death sentence in Singapore. Apparently Van Nguyen had agreed to smuggle the heroin in order to pay off the debts of his twin brother Khoa (‘Timeline: The life of Van Nguyen’, 2005). The execution went ahead despite vigorous pleas for clemency from the Australian government, human rights activists, the Australian people, and even the pope. Australia’s attorney general, Philip Ruddock, termed the hanging ‘barbaric’ (‘Mother only allowed to hold hands’, 2005) and then prime minister John Howard warned that the execution would harm the relationship between the people of Singapore and Australia. Singapore’s prime minister Lee Hsien Loong, however, defended the execution and Singapore’s tough stance on drug smuggling as necessary to deter smugglers from using the island as a transit zone for illegal drugs. ‘We … think that drug traffi cking is a crime that deserves the death penalty. The evil infl icted on thousands of people with drug traffi cking demands that we must tackle the source by punishing the traffi ckers rather than trying to pick up the pieces afterwards’ (‘Drug traffi cking deserves death penalty’, 2005).
