While the global trend headed towards abolishing the death sentence, Malaysia seemed to be moving in the opposite direction, noted an international rights group.

Instead of joining 123 other countries to abandon the death penalty, Amnesty International (AI) said Malaysia was mulling the possibility of introducing capital punishment under the proposed Water Industry Bill 2006.

"It is regrettable that the government is proposing in its Water Industry Bill to extend the use of death penalty for anyone found guilty of contaminating water sources," said AI Malaysia executive director Josef Roy Benedict in a press statement yesterday .

Malaysia is one of the 74 countries which still impose the death penalty. It is mandatory for murder, selected firearms offences, drug trafficking and treason.

The punishment is also imposed as discretionary for certain crimes linked to kidnapping, firearms and waging war.

According to AI's global statistics on the death penalty released yesterday, the number of deaths worldwide for 2005 saw a substantial fall compared to the year before which saw 3,797 people killed for various crimes.

It was stated that more than 2,000 prisoners were executed last year while another 20,000 are on death row. China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States accounted for 94 percent of the recorded executions with China topping the list with 1,770 deaths.

AI noted the report contained minimum figures especially concerning China as authorities there have refused to publish the full statistics concerning death sentences.

Silent authorities

According to the rights group, authorities here have also consistently refused to release the statistics.

Contacted later, Benedict said apart from the fact that the majority of death sentences are carried out for drug trafficking, little else is known about the situation in Malaysia.

"Because of the lack of information, we are unable to get the exact figures. Apart from media reports, there is nothing for us to determine the figures, either on death penalties taken place or how many people are on death row, he added.

He said AI's repeated attempts to seek information from the relevant authorities have been futile.

"There seemed to be a lack of will on the part of the authorities to release the information which is quite sad because such information should be made open to the public," he added.

Benedict said the failure to disclose regular statistics on the issue and details of how the judicial process affected the lives of condemned prisoners meant that Malaysians were unable to know how the death penalty worked in reality.

This in turn inhibited informed public debates, he added.

The activist expressed hope that the current administration under Abdullah Ahmad Badawi would lift the veil on this matter.

Culture of violence

AI Malaysia also noted encouraging signs of the renewal of debate on abolishing the death penalty in Malaysia as recently mooted by the Bar Council . The council passed a resolution calling for the death penalty to be abolished and for a moratorium on all executions.

Benedict said more people were aware that the death penalty diverted attention from consideration of alternative and more effective measures needed to prevent crime.

"Recent crime figures fail to show that abolition (of the death sentence) had harmful effects and scientific studies have consistently failed to find convincing evidence that the death penalty deterred crime more effectively than other punishments.

"Instead it fuelled a culture of violence, is often applied in a discriminatory and arbitrary manner and has no place in modern society respecting human rights values," he added.

Last December, former deputy internal security minister Chia Kwang Chye said in Parliament that the government had no plans to review the death penalty.

He revealed that from1960 up to October 2005, 434 convicted criminals had been executed while 172 were still in the process of appealing.

From that figure, 229 were convicted of drug offences, while the others were convicted for murder, arms trafficking and kidnaping.