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Anti-Death Penalty Asia Network (Adpan) executive coordinator Dobby Chew said this was a last-ditch effort to halt the execution through a diplomatic process.
He said Adpan had made a request to foreign minister Saifuddin Abdullah’s office, but had been told the power to formally initiate this process lay with home minister Hamzah Zainudin.
Chew said that although there had not been a case like this in Malaysia, there were precedents of European nations requesting the return of their citizens from Southeast Asian countries, through discussions held behind closed doors.
Chew, who was accompanied by Lawyers for Liberty (LFL) chief coordinator Zaid Malek and Suara Rakyat Malaysia (Suaram) documentation and monitoring coordinator Kenneth Cheng, submitted the memorandum to the home ministry’s deputy secretary, Rizal Hashim, outside the ministry’s main entrance today.
Speaking to reporters later, he said it was also illegal under international law to execute a mentally ill person, “but Singapore still denies his (Nagaenthran’s) mental state.”
The 34-year-old, from Perak, is said to have an IQ of 69 – a level recognised as a disability. He has been on death row in Singapore since 2010 for smuggling 42.7gm of heroin into the city state a year earlier.
Zaid said the Singapore government should follow international law as Nagaenthran is protected under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).”
A gathering of support for Nagaenthran will be held outside the Singapore High Commission at 4pm tomorrow.
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