Per Human Rights Watch, the Thai authorities have lifted their nine-year de facto moratorium on capital punishment. The last recorded lethal injection in Thailand was in August of 2009. The case that resumed the practices of the capital punishment stemmed from a 2012 aggravated murder conviction. Thailand’s Corrections Department states that there are still over 500 prisoners on death row, many of whom have requested commutation of their sentences during the nine-year moratorium. Human Rights Watch “opposes capital punishment in all countries and in all circumstances because of its inherent cruelty”. Many of the 500 prisoners have capital punishments pending on drug-related convictions. The United Nations General Assembly has long sought the abolishment of the practice of capital punishments. At the least, they have continually called for long-term moratoriums, a slowdown of the application of the practice, and minimizing the number of crimes for which capital punishment could be applied to. The reasoning behind the UN’s push for such an abolition on the death penalty stems from the general ineffectiveness that capital punishment has on crime levels. It’s also the position of the UN Human Rights Committee that the practice be banned and more specifically the practice should be banned in drug-related cases.