By IPS Correspondents
BEIJING, Mar 29 2006 (IPS)

Stunned by the large number of executions carried out each year, Chinese legal experts and lawyers have joined human rights advocates in attacking the middle kingdom’s system of capital punishment as arbitrary and calling for swift changes to judicial process.

Authorities have responded with cautious strides towards reforming its notorious system of capital punishment. It is doing that in part by announcing changes in court procedures that are expected to reduce the number of executions by 20- 30 percent, human rights advocates said.

China, which keeps the number of people it executes under wraps, is believed to have carried out about 8,000 executions in 2005, said Liu Renwen, a scholar at the Law Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Amnesty International (AI) documented at least 3,400 executions in 2004 – 90 percent of the total of capital punishments recorded around the world – but workers for the rights lobby said they believe the actual number to be higher.

Liu and AI belong to a growing lobby of opponents of the death penalty in the country, fighting to stop its arbitrary use and reform the judicial system. China has come under fire for its widespread use of torture to extract confessions and achieve high rates of convictions in courts.

Meanwhile, a United Nations special investigator on torture, who was granted access to Chinese detention centres, after nearly a decade of negotiations, has criticised the heavy reliance on confessions, saying it encouraged the use of torture.

The most common methods, Manfred Nowak reported, were beatings with fists, sticks and electric batons. Prisoners also said they had been burned with cigarettes, beaten by fellow inmates under guard instructions and submersed in water or sewage. Many detainees were held for long periods in extreme positions and death row inmates were kept constantly shackled or handcuffed.

Such systematic abuse was designed to break the will of detainees until they confessed, he concluded. “The criminal justice system is focused on admission of culpability, and the role of obtaining confessions continues to be central to successful prosecutions,” Nowak wrote in his report. As special rapporteur and expert mandated by the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights, Nowak concluded that “torture, though on the decline – particularly in urban areas – remains widespread in China”.

Forced confessions have long been denounced by legal rights advocates who say they lead to arbitrary rulings by provincial judges and the high number of death sentences.

Liu, the legal scholar, said provincial courts often resort to arbitrary sentencing because they face political pressure to control crime rates within their legal domains.

“Local governments think it (the death penalty) is a good tool to control public security. They would be loath to see such power being taken away from them,” he told foreign correspondents at a meeting in Beijing.

Political pressure intensifies particularly during the periodic Yan Da (Strike Hard) campaigns against crime. Initiated in 1983, by China’s late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, to counter the downsides of the country’s opening to the outside world, Yan Da campaigns were revived in 1996 by former President Jiang Zemin.

During these crackdowns, the country’s legal institutions are required to speed up normal legal procedures in order to meet quotas for solved crimes. Death sentences are carried out swiftly by a bullet to the back of the head.

Since the first strike hard campaign in 1983, the number of crimes punished by death sentence has doubled from 32 to 68, including economic offences such as smuggling, tax evasion and embezzlement.

Since China signed the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1998, the lobby against the death penalty has grown larger, attracting legal scholars, lawyers and rights advocates.

Recent public outcry over several miscarriages of justice, involving the death penalty and the use of torture in prisons and detention centres, has strengthened the hand of reformers.

In one sensational case, a man accused of killing his wife was released from prison after 11 years, following the discovery that his wife was living with another man. The case sparked calls from legal experts to outlaw confessions gained through torture. Under the appeal to “kill fewer, kill carefully”, lawyers and scholars campaigned for a central review of all death penalties and reform of court procedures.

Even critics of the death penalty are aware that reform in China must go beyond arbitrary rulings. Surveys show that, for cultural and historical reasons, the majority of Chinese public support the use of death sentence as a deterrent for crimes.

Many people still believe in the old principle that “a life is paid with another life.” So while impetus for reform of the capital punishment system is growing, China is not likely to discontinue the use of the death penalty.

During the March annual legislative session of parliament, the government ruled out the abolition of the death penalty, according to people who attended.

Xiao Yang, president of the Supreme People’s Court, told legislators that grave economic crimes would still be punished by death. He announced, however, that a series of new measures would be implemented to avoid wrongful executions.

As a first step, the apex court is taking back the final review of all death penalty cases from the provincial courts. Moreover, when hearing death sentence trials for a second time, Chinese courts will begin open court sessions, allowing prosecutors, judges and defence attorneys to meet face to face.

“As of July 1, 2006, all second-instance trials of death sentence cases shall be heard in open court,” Xiao, who is also the country’s chief judge, said at a press conference.

But to regain control of the final decision in death sentences, the central government should first outlaw the use of evidence gained through torture, legal experts warn, or it would face difficulty in rightfully handling the reviews, legal experts said.

“Without discarding the use of such evidence, we cannot expect to achieve our goal of curbing wrongful executions,” Cai Zhang, president of the Jilin Province high court said at a panel discussion on the sidelines of the parliamentary session this month.

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