Seychelles suspends a cannabis sentence that once carried a 16-year minimum

Paul Ah Kong received a suspended prison sentence and a fine for trafficking 115 grams of cannabis in Seychelles in October 2016. The judge said the offence had previously carried a sixteen-year mandatory minimum, but the new drug law allowed him to consider a much lower sentence.

A prosecution met a changed law

Ah Kong had pleaded guilty to a charge framed under the old drug law. By the time the court sentenced him, the 2016 replacement had repealed that law while preserving proceedings brought under it.

The change raised a practical question for the judge: which punishment should apply to someone prosecuted under the earlier rules? Previous appeal decisions had established that an offender should receive the benefit of a later change in the law that favoured them.

Judge Burhan applied that principle to Ah Kong. He treated the newer sentencing rules as relevant even though the prosecution arose under the old law.

Sixteen years was no longer the minimum

The judgment identified the old minimum punishment for the offence as sixteen years in prison. It then explained that the new law had removed the mandatory minimum for this kind of offence.

That gave the judge room to assess both the cannabis quantity and the circumstances of the person being sentenced. Cannabis remained a Class B controlled drug, and the guilty plea still resulted in a conviction for trafficking.

The court also noted that the changed law could benefit Ah Kong through remission, a reduction in time served, if he had to serve a prison term.

A first offender with a young child

Ah Kong was thirty-two, had no previous conviction and was the father of an eight-month-old child. The judge considered his guilty plea as an expression of remorse that had also saved the court’s time.

He imposed two years in prison, suspended for two years, and a fine of 15,000 Seychelles rupees. Failure to pay the fine carried six months in prison. The court explained the suspended term to Ah Kong before concluding the hearing.

The reform reached existing prisoners too

The decision illustrated the wider change that parliament had approved earlier that year. Home Affairs Minister Charles Bastienne had argued for a response combining enforcement with rehabilitation as drug imprisonment increased.

A sentence-review tribunal gave people already imprisoned under the previous law a route to seek a shorter remaining term. Together, the review process and Ah Kong’s sentence showed how the reform could change the punishment imposed for cannabis offences in Seychelles.^[1][2][3]