By CNN
August 17, 2020

Today, jails in East and Southeast Asia hold the world's biggest proportions of female prisoners.

It was dark when the plane touched down in Hong Kong from Phnom Penh. Noor Yuni swiftly cleared immigration and collected her luggage.
But as she approached the "nothing to declare" lane, a customs officer pulled her aside, she says

The 21-year-old Indonesian's bag was put into the security scanner and she remembers agreeing to be searched.

By the time officers had slashed open the lining of her backpack and dislodged the white crystals concealed inside, Yuni said she knew she'd been tricked.

In recent years, its opium poppy fields have been giving way to jungle laboratories, as the demand for synthetic drugs outstrips the demand for heroin. Today, Southeast Asia is the epicenter of the global methamphetamine trade, which is worth up to $61 billion a year in Asia Pacific alone.

A 2018 report she co-authored found pervasive gender inequality in prosecutions of women for capital drug offenses including women's poorer access to legal representation and bail. Women accused of low-level drug trafficking sometimes received longer sentences than men up the chain, it said, as they had less information to trade for plea deals.

The impact of this on foreign women has been staggering. Of the 141 women on death row in Malaysia, as of February 2019, 95% were sentenced for trafficking drugs, compared to 70% of men, found Amnesty. And 90% of the women sentenced to death for drug trafficking were foreigners.

"Your access to justice is pretty much dependent on how deep your pockets are," says N Sivananthan, a criminal lawyer who's represented hundreds of drug trafficking-accused in Malaysia. He calls some "active participants" who swallowed cocaine in plastic bags or strapped meth to their thighs, qualifying they could have been coerced. But many were "duped," he says.

Jeremy Douglas, a regional representative for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), says many countries "continue to sentence couriers and people with low threshold amounts as traffickers -- which they are not." The UNODC is pushing for sentencing reform to focus on "traffickers that run the drug trade" not the couriers "disposable to organized crime," he said.

full article.https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/16/asia ... index.html

I would imagine the disparity between the percentages of the genders of prisoners on death row for drug trafficking, 90% of female prisoners as opposed to 75% of male prisoners would be caused by the fact that men have a higher propensity for extreme violence and murder than women, as opposed to a higher % of female drug traffickers being sentenced to death because of their gender.
The percentages of male and female murderers on death row would probably show the reverse disparity.

Men have a propensity for spontaneous violence. Women are more calculating. Like Srey Choppy.

These are generalizations, of course.

Why not just have all the drug producers of meth, heroin, cocaine, LSD, MDSM, etc., be the head of the UN’s council on drugs? Then every citizen on the world can be hooked, and no more cries of gender inequality or social justice.