A 29-year-old delivery driver was sentenced to death by hanging in Malaysia on Friday for trafficking around 300 grams of cannabis into the country in 2018.
Passing sentence, High Court judge Collin Lawrence Sequerah said the defence had failed to raise “reasonable doubts on the prosecution’s case on possession of the dangerous drugs” and “also failed to rebut the balance of probabilities on the presumption of trafficking.”
The accused, Mohamad Hafidul Rafiz Emmy, a Malaysian national, burst into tears upon hearing the sentence, according to state news agency Bernama.
A 2019 report by Amnesty International said almost a thousand people were on death row in Malaysia for drug-related crimes, under a law that “does not even meet the threshold of the ‘most serious crimes’ under international law.”
The government led by Mahathir Mohamad, who held power from mid-2018 until early last year, said it would abolish capital punishment, but the proposed reform was not implemented by the time Mahathir’s administration collapsed.
One year on, Malaysian police in March claimed a record drug seizure of 16 tons of narcotics with an estimated value of a billion dollars.
Thirty people were executed worldwide for drug offences last year, according to Harm Reduction International, a monitoring group, which counted “at least 213 people” on death row, including a Malaysian sentenced in Singapore during a May 2020 hearing held on Zoom in the middle of the city-state’s pandemic lockdown.
Recreational cannabis use has been legalized in several countries and regions in recent years, while medical use is allowed in dozens of jurisdictions, including in Malaysia’s neighbour Thailand.
