PETALING JAYA: Human rights group Lawyers for Liberty (LFL) has defended its claim that brutal extralegal execution methods have been carried out at Changi Prison in Singapore.
LFL director Melissa Sasidaran said their sources comprised former and current Singapore prison officers “with impeccable service records”.
The Singapore Straits Times reported that the republic’s Home Affairs Ministry had slammed LFL’s allegations about its execution methods. These claims are “untrue, baseless and preposterous”, according to the ministry.
The ministry has ordered LFL and three other parties - Singaporean activist Kirsten Han, The Oline Citizen (TOC) website and Yahoo Singapore - to correct the “false” statements.
In a statement issued earlier this month, LFL claimed that prison officers had been instructed to “kick the back of the next of a prisoner with great force” to break it if the rope snapped during a hanging.
It also claimed that the Singapore government approved of “unlawful methods” to cover up an execution if the rope snapped.
However, the ministry said all judicial executions were carried out under strict compliance with the law. This included the presence of a prison chief, a medical doctor, and a coroner who must confirm within 24 hours that the execution was carried out properly.
In a statement issued today, which has also been uploaded on LFL’s website and Facebook page, Sasidaran demanded that the correction notice, which was issued to demand that LFL retracted its statement, be withdrawn unconditionally, with immediate effect.
Similarly, she said, the same notice to the TOC and Han should also be withdrawn.
