36 percent of the people executed in Singapore between...

36 percent of the people executed in Singapore between 1993 and 2003 were foreigners, the Home Affairs Ministry said as it released a second defence of its capital punishment laws following a scathing Amnesty International report. Over the past five years the government said the percentage of foreigners executed had fallen to 27 percent, with 37 out of 138 people executed being non-Singaporean. It said nearly three quarters of those executed over the past five years were punished for drug-related offences, while the others were for murder and arms-related offences. The government defended the number of foreigners being executed in the country, pointing out that one in four people living in Singapore were born overseas. The Singapore government rarely discussed in detail its capital punishment system. But it released a wealth of data in a 19-page rebuttal of an Amnesty report put out two weeks earlier that said the tiny island-state of just over four million people had the highest per capita execution rate in the world. The government did not give out the total number of people executed, preferring only to release specific figures for the past five years. In its rejection of Amnesty's claim that the capital punishment laws ensnared the most vulnerable members of society, the government said 80 percent had received "formal education". But graphs released as an appendix showed 51 percent of people executed over the past 10 years were cleaners, labourers, unskilled workers or unemployed. Just two percent executed had vocational or tertiary training, while five percent were aged between 18 and 20.