China and drug law executions

On 29th December 2009, Akmal Shaikh, a British citizen, was executed by the Chinese authorities by means of lethal injection. Mr Shaikh had been in custody since 2007, when he was arrested for carrying 4 kilos of heroin into China. Despite last minute appeals for clemency by his family and the British government, and protests from around the world, China has stubbornly defended its actions and its independent right to punish as it sees fit.


There’s a colonial and imperial background to this: in China, the memory of the opium trade from British India, which was carried on against the express wish of the Chinese government, and against Chinese law, is still fresh, along with the “Treaty Ports” system that allowed the writ of European law to run in Chinese centres of maritime trading.

In this context, one might expect that intervention on the part of the United Nations would have been more effective. However, Professor Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on summary and extra-judicial executions, wrote to the Chinese asking them to explain the rationale behind Mr Shaikh’s sentence, pointing out that he suffered from a mental illness. His letter was ignored.

This intervention from the UN is welcome. However, the stream of rhetoric coming from the UN drugs agencies, as well as from British and other politicians around the world, helps to maintain the climate that is used to justify the execution. The Chinese embassy in London stated that, “The amount of heroin he brought into China was 4,030g, enough to cause 26,800 deaths, threatening numerous families.” The question of mental illness aside, China regularly executes people for drugs crimes, and the extreme and exaggerated account of the danger that drugs pose lies at the root of the reasoning involved. The ‘War on Drugs’ may be a rhetorical device, but the bodies are real.