Capital Drug Laws in Asia by Wing-Cheong Chan, Mai Sato and Michael Hor (eds). Cambridge University Press, 2025. Xxvi + 274 pp. Hardcover 130.

Two issues have attracted sustained attention in the field of criminal justice and criminal law: drug laws and the death penalty.The global phenomenon of the War on Drugs and the continuing debates over capital punishment have engaged not only legal scholars but also researchers across the social sciences.The volume edited by Wing-Cheong Chan, Mai Sato, and Michael Hor offers an invaluable examination of the intersection of these two issues in the Asian context.Through a comparative lens, the book documents and analyses legal changes in drug laws, similarities and differences in states' approaches to the death penalty, the life experiences of drug offenders and individuals on death row, and the key actors shaping capital drug laws.The book examines seven Asian jurisdictions: Mainland China, Iran, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Hong Kong.Among the many merits of the book, perhaps its most important contribution is its demonstration of the constant entanglement between punitiveness and leniency across many Asian countries.Several chapters document a gradual movement toward more controlled and, in some cases, more lenient approaches to serious drug offenses.For instance, chapter 2, written by Xi Li, highlights how China's Supreme People's Court has tightened evidentiary requirements in death penalty cases, contributing to a relative reduction in executions.Ronnakorn Bunmee in chapter 9 shows that since 2021, Thailand has promoted a public health approach to drug control, partly in response to severe prison overcrowding.While Singapore (chapter 4 by Wing-Cheong Chan, Michael Hor) resumed executions after the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to enforce strict drug policies, the chapter notes that ' there are faint glimmers of easing at the margin' when examining judicial practices (p.92).However, these gradual improvements occur under the enduring shadow of the War on Drugs in Asia.The broader commitment to harsh punishment for drug offenses remains largely intact rather than fundamentally dismantled.This punitive culture is reflected not only in sentencing outcomes but also in how defendants are treated during criminal proceedings.A case study on Iran (chapter 3), written by Mai Sato and Leavides Domingo-Cabarrubias, clearly illustrates this tension: although the legal threshold for imposing the death penalty in drug cases has been raised, mandatory death sentences remain.More importantly, convictions continue to rely heavily on confessions with limited procedural safeguards.Thaatchaayini Kananatu (chapter 5) describes people on death row in Malaysia as a 'non-rights-bearing group,' occupying an exceptional zone where basic legal protections are effectively forfeited.This lack of procedural protection is compounded by enforcement practices that often target low-level participants rather than major traffickers, as Carolyn Hoyle and Parvais Jabbar illustrated in their chapter on Indonesia (chapter 6).As a result, the War on Drugs can easily become a war on the poor or on certain ethnic groups.The role of drug law in controlling, punishing, and marginalizing certain groups emerges as a recurring theme throughout the book.