This papers describes Amnesty International’s concerns about the caning of prisoners in Singapore. Two cases are described. Qwek Kee Chong was given 48 strokes of the cane on 8 April 1988: he had been convicted on four charges of armed robbery in November 1987, after pleading guilty at a trial where he was not defended by a lawyer. The second case is taken from a report which appeared in “New Paper” on 12 October 1988, in which a businessman describes the experience of been caned (he was aged 17 at the time). During the period 1988-89, 1,218 prisoners were caned in Singapore, 234 of these were foreign nationals.
