Singapore doesn’t just execute drug dealers; it censors and arrests those who expose the ghoulish process:

A veteran British journalist and author promoting his book on the death penalty in Singapore was arrested in the country today for alleged criminal defamation and other offences.

Alan
Shadrake’s arrest came two days after Singapore’s Media Development
Authority lodged a police report…

The 75-year-old’s latest book, Once A Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice In The Dock,
contains accounts of high-profile cases in Singapore involving the use
of the death penalty, and includes interviews with a former
executioner, Darshan Singh…

Death penalty opponents who
helped to organise the Singapore launch were told by police that no
bail had yet been set for Shadrake, whose passport has been impounded.

Last
week one of Singapore’s biggest book retailers, Kinokuniya, withdrew
the book from its shelves after it was contacted by the Media
Development Authority, which controls censorship in Singapore…

What’s striking to me is that people seem more offended by the censorship than by executions for victimless crimes!  Of course, the magnitude of these human rights abuses is still small compared to the Number #1 blight on Singapore’s polity.  I suspect that these horrors will disappear in a generation, but ultra-stable Singapore could easily change course right away without tearing the social fabric.

HT: Tyler