As of 30 September 2026, Singapore had carried out 19 executions this year, all for drug-related offences. That already exceeds the 17 recorded in 2025 and is more than double the nine of 2024. Amnesty International, which gave the figures ahead of the World Day Against the Death Penalty on 10 October, says it leaves the city-state as the odd one out in Southeast Asia.
A region easing off
Amnesty’s new briefing, Changing Tides: Reform and resistance on the death penalty in ASEAN, describes a wave of reforms over the past 20 years across the bloc’s 11 members. Cambodia, the Philippines and Timor-Leste have abolished the penalty in law. Indonesia marked ten years without executions earlier this year, and Malaysia and Thailand are on course to do the same in 2027 and 2028. Brunei and Laos have kept up their own hiatuses.
The detail is where the change shows. Malaysia’s reforms cut the number of people under sentence of death from more than 1,200 to about 100 by the end of 2025, and drug-related death sentences handed down by its High Courts have been commuted on appeal since the mandatory penalty was abolished in 2023. Thailand has narrowed the circumstances for drug offences under its 2021 law. Indonesia’s new Criminal Code treats the penalty as a “special punishment” of last resort. Viet Nam is expected to cut capital offences from 18 to four in just over a year. Its official execution figures remain a state secret.
“The number of executing countries across ASEAN has steadily decreased, with just Myanmar, Singapore and Viet Nam recording executions in the past five years,” said Joshua Ericsson, executive director of Amnesty International Malaysia.
Singapore and Myanmar
Myanmar is the other setback. Its military authorities resumed judicial executions in 2022 after more than three decades without any, and widened the scope of the penalty in 2025 and 2026. Singapore, though, is the only ASEAN state Amnesty could confirm carrying out executions for drug offences, and the only one still imposing mandatory death sentences for trafficking. The group says those sentences, mostly handed down after unfair proceedings, make the executions unlawful and arbitrary under international standards. It also says Singapore has stepped up efforts to silence anti-death-penalty activists.
Amnesty is urging ASEAN governments that retain the penalty to set up or maintain an official moratorium and work toward full abolition. In the meantime it wants drug offences removed from capital law.
