This week's wrap is coming to you a little late because I spent most of Friday in the air—I'm finally back home after about three weeks in Australia. My cats seem pretty excited about that; as predicted, Salty started nagging and yelling at me right away...
(1)
One man was executed on Wednesday, two on Thursday, this week. This brings the total number of executions in 2025 up to 17—the highest number since 19 people were executed in 2003.
I know how determined the state is to carry out executions, how insistent those in power are about not giving an inch and moving forward with death sentences. But even after I heard the news about these three execution notices, a part of me had believed that the executions would be halted—how could they continue, when there's an ongoing challenge to the constitutionality of the mandatory death penalty for drug offences?
As it turns out, that didn't stop them at all.
This is what Tay Yong Kwang, a Court of Appeal judge, wrote in the grounds of his decision to dismiss Saminathan Selvaraju's application for a stay of execution:
A stay of execution will not be granted solely because there are some pending legal proceedings, regardless of the merits of those proceedings. If the legal position is otherwise, it would encourage PACPs and spur interest groups and other persons to mount unending unmeritorious constitutional challenges against the MDA or other death penalty legislation just to stall all executions. As the AG points out, such an outcome would contradict Parliament’s intention in enacting the PACC Act which was to “ensure that safeguards are in place to prevent abuse of process by a PACP when making a PACC application”.
He then went on to say that our constitutional challenge has "no reasonable prospects of success"—even though he was only basing that off an affidavit, without having actually read our full legal submissions. The hearing for our challenge will only be held in chambers on 3 December.
I really can't get my head around how single-mindedly the system pursues the act of killing. How much they prioritise hanging people according to their schedule, like it's just another ordinary administrative process that needs to get done, like it's not a matter of actual human lives.
We can only hope that there will be no more execution notices for the rest of the year. But even if that's the case, there has already been too much killing. The government continues to justify this practice, using Singaporeans as cover: during a roundtable with Malaysian journalists, Vivian Balakrishnan, the foreign affairs minister, said that there's "overwhelming support" for the death penalty. Of course, he doesn't mention that successive PAP governments have inundated Singaporeans with pro-death penalty, pro-war on drugs propaganda, nor does he mention that while public opinion surveys do show majority support for the death penalty, this isn't as enthusiastic or unqualified as the government makes it appear.
(2)
Scams, scams, a myriad of scams. It's a huge and ongoing headache for law enforcement in Singapore, and the government has been trying all sorts of ways to keep a lid on it. The Singapore Police Force, using the Online Criminal Harms Act, has now demanded that Apple and Google do something to curb scam messages impersonating government agencies over iMessage and Google Messages.
The government has been using "gov.sg" as their sender ID to send regular text messages, so Singaporeans know that it's really them. But this doesn't apply to iMessage or Google Messages, and since regular SMSes and iMessage/Google Messages all appear together on phones, people might fall for scammers pretending to be the government over iMessage or Google Message. So the police wants Apple and Google to prevent accounts or group chats that spoof "gov.sg" or government agencies in their display names, and also to ensure that the phone numbers of unknown senders are displayed more prominently than their display names, so it's harder to mistake them for some sort of legit entity.
Separately, the police want two other tech companies, Meta and TikTok, to do something else: essentially, kick Zulfikar bin Mohamad Shariff—a former Singaporean and detainee under the Internal Security Act, now an Australian citizen—off their platforms. Also using the Online Criminal Harms Act, they've issued an Account Restriction Direction and a Disabling Direction to the two companies. The Ministry of Home Affairs statement says that "Zulfikar, a foreigner, has repeatedly continued to stir up discontent within the local Malay/Muslim community against the Chinese community in Singapore. He has incited feelings of enmity, hatred, ill-will and hostility against, contempt for and ridicule of different racial and religious groups in Singapore." The police have also opened an investigation into him.
(3)
If Singapore doesn't want you here, you're not even going to be able to get on a plane. From 30 January 2026, Singapore will be sending lists of "undesirable" travellers to airlines, requiring them to bar these people from even getting on flights to Singapore. People who don't meet the entry requirements for Singapore—like having a visa or at least six months' validity on their passports—will also be included in such no-boarding directives.
Perhaps they'd like to avoid the embarrassment of getting into the news for things like denying entry to Hong Kong activist Nathan Law at the border? Although Law did have a valid visa, so... who in the Immigration & Checkpoints Authority got yelled at?
Among the many things that we do at the Transformative Justice Collective is supporting families of death row prisoners, as much as we can, with their various needs. For this purpose, we run the TJC Support Fund, which can be used for a variety of things, including travel expenses (so that they can come to Singapore for prison visits), or, if it comes to it, funeral costs.
If you can, please consider making a contribution to the TJC Support Fund either by scanning the QR code above or making a PayNow transfer to our UEN 201025212ETJ8. Please add "TJC Support Fund" in the reference so we know that your donation has been earmarked for this purpose! 🙏🏼
Something interesting
🎧 Over at Currents, discussion of the movement against corruption in the Philippines. This is a good time to be listening to this podcast, because huge protests are set to take place in the Philippines tomorrow.
Calum Stuart
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