MALAYSIA. AMNESTY REGRETS PROPOSAL TO EXTEND THE USE OF DEATH PENALTY

Amnesty International Malaysia said it regretted that the Malaysian government was proposing in its Water Industry Bill 2006 to extend the use of the death penalty for anyone found guilty of contaminating water sources.
Amnesty International Malaysia's executive director Josef Roy Benedict said Malaysia was one of 74 countries in the world which still imposed the death penalty.
"Today, as Amnesty International releases global statistics on the death penalty, Malaysia is bucking a global trend towards abolition by proposing to add water pollution to its list of capital offences," he said in a statement here.
Roy Benedict said that the death penalty diverted attention from consideration of alternative and more effective measures needed to prevent crime.
He also said that the Malaysian government's failure to regularly disclose full official statistics on the number of people sentenced to death and executed and details of how the judicial process affected the lives of condemned prisoners "means that Malaysians are unable to know how the death penalty works and is practiced in their own country, which therefore inhibits informed public debate."