Foreign News
Singapore steps up executions and pressure on anti-death penalty groups
Masoud Rahimi Mehrzad’s father was in a remote part of Iran when he received the news that he had long dreaded.
His son was to be hanged in Singapore’s Changi Prison.
Suffering from deteriorating health and with just a week’s notice until the execution at dawn on November 29, he was unable to take on the demanding trip to see his son in person for one last time, according to reports. Instead, the final contact between the father and son came via a long-distance phone call.
Despite a last-ditch legal challenge, Masoud was hanged on the final Friday of November, more than 14 years after he was first arrested for drug offences.
Masoud, 35, became the ninth person to be hanged in Singapore this year.
“With four executions in November alone, the Singaporean government is relentlessly pursuing its cruel use of the death penalty,” said Bryony Lau, Deputy Director for Asia at Human Rights Watch.
Anti-death penalty campaign groups believe that about 50 inmates are currently on death row in Singapore.
Despite opposition from prominent human rights groups and United Nations experts, Singapore claims that capital punishment has been “an effective deterrent” against drug traffickers and ensures the city-state is “one of the safest places in the world”.
A group of UN experts said in a joint statement last month that Singapore should “move from a reliance on criminal law and take a human rights-based approach in relation to drug use and drug use disorders”.
Stories of the plight of death row inmates generally come from activists, who work tirelessly to fight for the rights of those facing the ultimate punishment.
The recent wave of executions has now left them shaken.
“It’s a nightmare,” says Kokila Annamalai, a prominent anti-death penalty campaigner with the Transformative Justice Collective (TJC).
Her work has led her to form a close bond with many death row prisoners.
“They’re more than just people we are campaigning for. They’re also our friends, they feel like our siblings. It’s been very difficult for us personally,” Annamalai told Al Jazeera.
Like almost all of Singapore’s prisoners on death row, Masoud was convicted for drug offences.
Born in Singapore to an Iranian father and Singaporean mother, he had spent his childhood between Iran and Dubai. At the age of 17, he returned to Singapore to complete his compulsory national service and it was during this period in his life that he was arrested on drug charges.
In May 2010, aged 20, he drove to meet a Malaysian man at a petrol station in central Singapore. Masoud took a package from the man, before driving away. He was soon stopped by the police. They searched the package and some other bags that they found in the car.
In total, officers discovered more than 31 grams of diamorphine, which is also known as heroin, and 77 grams of methamphetamine.
Masoud was arrested for possessing drugs with the purpose of trafficking.
Under Singapore’s strict laws, anyone caught carrying more than 15 grams of heroin can face the death penalty.
Masoud told police that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety. He also blamed an illegal money-lending syndicate for planting the drugs in order to frame him.
His defence did not stand up in court and he was sentenced to death in 2015.
Masoud’s sister, Mahnaz, released an open letter shortly before her brother was hanged last month. She described the pain that the death sentence had inflicted on their father.
“My dad was completely heartbroken, and he has never recovered. One of my brothers died when he was 7 years old, from appendicitis … losing another son, he couldn’t accept it,” she wrote.
Masoud had fought tirelessly to appeal his conviction, but his numerous legal challenges failed, as did a plea for clemency to Singapore’s President Tharman Shanmugaratnam.
Before his own execution, Masoud’s sister recounted how her brother had dedicated his time on death row to helping other prisoners with their own legal battles.
“He’s very invested in helping them find peace,” Mahnaz said. “He feels it’s his responsibility to fight for his life as well as the others, and he wishes for everyone on death row to feel the same motivation, to be there for each other,” she said.
In October, Masoud was one of 13 death row prisoners who won a case against the Singapore Prison Service and the Attorney General ‘s Chambers, after they were deemed to have acted unlawfully by disclosing and requesting the private letters of prisoners.
The court also found that the prisoners’ right to confidentiality had been breached.
Masoud was also due to represent a group of 31 prisoners in a constitutional challenge against a new law relating to the post-appeal process in death penalty cases. A hearing in that legal challenge is still scheduled for late January 2025, a date that is now too late for Masoud.
Singapore’s Central Narcotics Bureau said the fact that Masoud’s execution was carried out in advance of the upcoming high court hearing was “not relevant to his conviction or sentence”.
After a two-year pause due to the COVID-19 pandemic, executions have ramped up in recent years in the Southeast Asian finance hub.
According to news reports, 25 prisoners have been executed in Singapore since 2022, with the authorities showing little prospect of softening their approach to capital punishment for drug traffickers.
Anti-death penalty campaigners in the city-state continue to voice their outrage at the government’s actions, using social media to amplify the personal stories of death row prisoners.
However, they have started to receive “correction orders” from government authorities, which are issued under Singapore’s controversial fake news law.
Annamalai’s TJC group has been targeted with the law – the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA) – over several posts relating to death row cases.
The campaign group has been instructed to include a “correction notice” with their original posts and also share an online link to a government website, for further clarification.
“It’s always a story of a prisoner facing imminent execution that gets POFMA’d”, Annamalai said.
Describing these stories of individual prisoners as “the most powerful”, Annamalai says the group has been specifically targeted because “people start to care deeply and want to take action when they read them”.
Rights groups have hit out at the authorities’ recent targeting of activist groups.
“We condemn in the strongest terms the continued intimidation and climate of fear that the authorities have created around anti-death penalty activism in Singapore and demand that the harassment of activists ceases at once,” seven anti-death penalty groups said in a joint statement in October.
Elizabeth Wood, CEO of the Capital Punishment Justice Project, based in Melbourne, Australia, and one of the seven signatories to the letter, said that those fighting to end executions are being cast as “glorifying” drug traffickers.
“They announced that they would be creating a day of remembrance for the victims of drugs. That’s another means to accuse activists of glorifying and trying to humanise drug traffickers,” Wood said.
Human Rights Watch’s Lau said the “Singaporean government should not use its repressive and overly broad laws to attempt to silence anti-death penalty activists”.
Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs declined an interview request from Al Jazeera.
In a recent statement, the Home Affairs Ministry said they “do not target, silence and harass organisations and individuals simply for speaking out against the death penalty”.
Annamalai of TJC said she will continue her activism, despite facing a POFMA correction order for a post on her personal Facebook page. Though facing the risk of a fine or even a prison sentence, Annamalai said she will not make a correction.
“They’re aggressively and desperately trying to silence us, but they will not succeed,” she added.
[Aljazeera]
Austria has passed a law banning headscarves in schools for girls under the age of 14.
The conservative-led coalition of three centrist parties, the ÖVP, the SPÖ and the Neos, says the law is a “clear commitment to gender equality”, but critics say it will fuel anti-Muslim feeling in the country and could be unconstitutional.
The measure will apply to girls in both public and private schools.
In 2020, a similar headscarf ban for girls under 10 was struck down by the Constitutional Court, because it specifically targeted Muslims.
The terms of the new law mean girls under 14 will be forbidden from wearing “traditional Muslim” head coverings such as hijabs or burkas.
If a student violates the ban, they must have a series of discussions with school authorities and their legal guardians. If there are repeated violations, the child and youth welfare agency must be notified.
As a last resort, families or guardians could be fined up to €800 (£700).
Members of the government say this is about empowering young girls, arguing it is to protect them “from oppression”.
Speaking ahead of the vote, the parliamentary leader of the liberal Neos party, Yannick Shetty said it was “not a measure against a religion. It is a measure to protect the freedom of girls in this country,” and added that the ban would affect about 12,000 children.
The opposition far-right Freedom Party of Austria, the FPÖ, which voted in favour of the ban, said it did not go far enough.
It described the ban as “a first step”, which should be widened to include all pupils and school staff.
“There needs to be a general ban on headscarves in schools; political Islam has no place here”, the FPÖ’s spokesperson on families Ricarda Berger said.
Sigrid Maurer from the opposition Greens called the new law “clearly unconstitutional”.
The official Islamic Community in Austria, the IGGÖ, said the ban violated fundamental rights and would split society.
In a statement on its website, it said “instead of empowering children, they will be stigmatised and marginalised.”
The IGGÖ said it would review “the constitutionality of the law and take all necessary steps.”
“The Constitutional Court already ruled unequivocally in 2020 that such a ban is unconstitutional, as it specifically targets a religious minority and violates the principle of equality,” the IGGÖ said.
The government says it has tried to avoid that.
“Will it pass muster with the Constitutional Court? I don’t know. We have done our best,” Shetty said.
An awareness-raising trial period will start in February 2026, with the ban fully going into force next September – the beginning of the new school year.
[BBC]
At least 34 people have died and dozens more are injured after air strikes from Myanmar’s military hit a hospital in the country’s west on Wednesday night, according to ground sources.
The hospital is located in Mrauk-U town in Rakhine state, an area controlled by the Arakan Army – one of the strongest ethnic armies fighting the country’s military regime.
Thousands have died and millions have been displaced since the military seized power in a coup in 2021 and triggered a civil war.
In recent months, the military has intensified air strikes to take back territory from ethnic armies. It has also developed paragliders to drop bombs on its enemies.
The Myanmar military has not commented on the strikes, which come as the country prepares to vote later this month in its first election since the coup.
However, pro-military accounts on Telegram claim the strikes this week were not aimed at civilians.
Khaing Thukha, a spokesperson for the Arakan Army, told the BBC that most of the casualties were patients at the hospital.
“This is the latest vicious attack by the terrorist military targeting civilian places,” he said, adding that the military “must take responsibility” for bombing civilians.
The Arakan Army health department said the strike, which occurred at around 21:00 (14:30 GMT), killed 10 patients on the spot and injured many others.
Photos believed to be from the scene have been circulating on social media showing missing roofs across parts of the building complex, broken hospital beds and debris strewn across the ground.
The junta has been locked in a years-long bloody conflict with ethnic militias, at one point losing control of more than half the country.
But recent influx of technology and equipment from China and Russia seems to have helped it turn the tide. The junta has made significant gains through a campaign of airstrikes and heavy bombardment.
Earlier this year, more than 20 people were killed after an army motorised paraglider dropped two bombs on a crowd protesting at a religious festival.
Civil liberties have also shrunk dramatically under the junta. Tens of thousands of political dissidents have been arrested, rights groups estimate.
Myanmar’s junta has called for a general election on 28 December, touting it as a pathway to political stability.
But critics say the election will be neither free nor fair, but will instead offer the junta a guise of legitimacy. Tom Andrews, the United Nations’ human rights expert on Myanmar, has called it a “sham election”.
In recent weeks the junta has arrested civilians accused of disrupting the vote, including one man who authorities said had sent out anti-election messages on Facebook.
The junta also said on Monday that it was looking for 10 activists involved in an anti-election protest.
Ethnic armies and other opposition groups have pledged to boycott the polls.
At least one election candidate in in central Myanmar’s Magway Region was detained by an anti-junta group, the Associated Press reported.
[BBC]
In a village in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, a woman receives a small but steady sum each month – not wages, for she has no formal job, but an unconditional cash transfer from the government.
Premila Bhalavi says the money covers medicines, vegetables and her son’s school fees. The sum, 1,500 rupees ($16: £12), may be small, but its effect – predictable income, a sense of control and a taste of independence – is anything but.
Her story is increasingly common. Across India, 118 million adult women in 12 states now receive unconditional cash transfers from their governments, making India the site of one of the world’s largest and least-studied social-policy experiments.
Long accustomed to subsidising grain, fuel and rural jobs, India has stumbled into something more radical: paying adult women simply because they keep households running, bear the burden of unpaid care and form an electorate too large to ignore.
Eligibility filters vary – age thresholds, income caps and exclusions for families with government employees, taxpayers or owners of cars or large plots of land.
“The unconditional cash transfers signal a significant expansion of Indian states’ welfare regimes in favour of women,” Prabha Kotiswaran, a professor of law and social justice at King’s College London, told the BBC.
The transfers range from 1,000-2,500 rupees ($12-$30) a month – meagre sums, worth roughly 5-12% of household income, but regular. With 300 million women now holding bank accounts, transfers have become administratively simple.
Women typically spend the money on household and family needs – children’s education, groceries, cooking gas, medical and emergency expenses, retiring small debts and occasional personal items like gold or small comforts.
What sets India apart from Mexico, Brazil or Indonesia – countries with large conditional cash-transfer schemes – is the absence of conditions: the money arrives whether or not a child attends school or a household falls below the poverty line.
Goa was the first state to launch an unconditional cash transfer scheme to women in 2013. The phenomenon picked up just before the pandemic in 2020, when north-eastern Assam rolled out a scheme for vulnerable women. Since then these transfers have turned into a political juggernaut.
The recent wave of unconditional cash transfers targets adult women, with some states acknowledging their unpaid domestic and care work. Tamil Nadu frames its payments as a “rights grant” while West Bengal’s scheme similarly recognises women’s unpaid contributions.
In other states, the recognition is implicit: policymakers expect women to use the transfers for household and family welfare, say experts.
This focus on women’s economic role has also shaped politics: in 2021, Tamil actor-turned-politician Kamal Haasan promised “salaries for housewives”. (His fledgling party lost.) By 2024, pledges of women-focused cash transfers helped deliver victories to political parties in Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Odisha, Haryana and Andhra Pradesh.
In the recent elections in Bihar, the political power of cash transfers was on stark display. In the weeks before polling in the country’s poorest state, the government transferred 10,000 rupees ($112; £85) to 7.5 million female bank accounts under a livelihood-generation scheme. Women voted in larger numbers than men, decisively shaping the outcome.
Critics called it blatant vote-buying, but the result was clear: women helped the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led coalition secure a landslide victory. Many believe this cash infusion was a reminder of how financial support can be used as political leverage.
Yet Bihar is only one piece of a much larger picture. Across India, unconditional cash transfers are reaching tens of millions of women on a regular basis.
Maharashtra alone promises benefits for 25 million women; Odisha’s scheme reaches 71% of its female voters.
In some policy circles, the schemes are derided as vote-buying freebies. They also put pressure on state finances: 12 states are set to spend around $18bn on such payouts this fiscal year. A report by think-tank PRS Legislative Research notes that half of these states face revenue deficits – this happens when a state borrows to pay regular expenses without creating assets.
But many argue they also reflect a slow recognition of something India’s feminists have argued for decades: the economic value of unpaid domestic and care work.
Women in India spent nearly five hours a day on such work in 2024 – more than three times the time spent by men, according to the latest Time Use Survey. This lopsided burden helps explain India’s stubbornly low female labour-force participation. The cash transfers, at least, acknowledge the imbalance, experts say.
Do they work?
Evidence is still thin but instructive. A 2025 study in Maharashtra found that 30% of eligible women did not register – sometimes because of documentation problems, sometimes out of a sense of self-sufficiency. But among those who did, nearly all controlled their own bank accounts.
A 2023 survey in West Bengal found that 90% operated their accounts themselves and 86% decided how to spend the money. Most used it for food, education and medical costs; hardly transformative, but the regularity offered security and a sense of agency.
More detailed work by Prof Kotiswaran and colleagues shows mixed outcomes.
In Assam, most women spent the money on essentials; many appreciated the dignity it afforded, but few linked it to recognition of unpaid work, and most would still prefer paid jobs.
In Tamil Nadu, women getting the money spoke of peace of mind, reduced marital conflict and newfound confidence – a rare social dividend. In Karnataka, beneficiaries reported eating better, gaining more say in household decisions and wanting higher payments.
Yet only a sliver understood the scheme as compensation for unpaid care work; messaging had not travelled. Even so, women said the money allowed them to question politicians and manage emergencies. Across studies, the majority of women had full control of the cash.
“The evidence shows that the cash transfers are tremendously useful for women to meet their own immediate needs and those of their households. They also restore dignity to women who are otherwise financially dependent on their husbands for every minor expense,” Prof Kotiswaran says.
Importantly, none of the surveys finds evidence that the money discourages women from seeking paid work or entrench gender roles – the two big feminist fears, according to a report by Prof Kotiswaran along with Gale Andrew and Madhusree Jana.
Nor have they reduced women’s unpaid workload, the researchers find. They do, however, strengthen financial autonomy and modestly strengthen bargaining power. They are neither panacea nor poison: they are useful but limited tools, operating in a patriarchal society where cash alone cannot undo structural inequities.
What next?
The emerging research offers clear hints.
Eligibility rules should be simplified, especially for women doing heavy unpaid care work. Transfers should remain unconditional and independent of marital status.
But messaging should emphasise women’s rights and the value of unpaid work, and financial-literacy efforts must deepen, researchers say. And cash transfers cannot substitute for employment opportunities; many women say what they really want is work that pays and respect that endures.
“If the transfers are coupled with messaging on the recognition of women’s unpaid work, they could potentially disrupt the gendered division of labour when paid employment opportunities become available,” says Prof Kotiswaran.
India’s quiet cash transfers revolution is still in its early chapters. But it already shows that small, regular sums – paid directly to women – can shift power in subtle, significant ways.
Whether this becomes a path to empowerment or merely a new form of political patronage will depend on what India chooses to build around the money.
[BBC]
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