For those of us who have argued for years against the death penalty, 2025 was a sign that Southeast Asia is heading in the right direction.

In June, the Vietnamese government reduced the number of death-eligible offenses from 18 to 10, replacing the death penalty with life imprisonment for crimes like certain drug offenses, corruption-related offenses, espionage, and some state-security crimes. Vietnam is still very much a retentionist state, but, notably, Hanoi has acknowledged that full abolitionism is now a matter of “when” not “whether.” One imagines that “when” will come before 2035.

Equally important, in November, the Malaysian government announced that it would form a Policy and Direction Review Working Group to study the total abolition of the death penalty, which would begin in January 2026 and is likely to report back in mid-2026. Malaysia already abolished the mandatory death penalty in 2023, but the latest move suggests, as Amnesty International noted, that Malaysia is on the “irrevocable path towards the total abolition of this cruel,........

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