China's top legislature, the National People's Congress (NPC),
has put the revision of the Criminal Procedural Law into its
five-year legislation plan to prevent and control the widespread
use of torture to extort confessions.
An official with the Commission of Legislative Affairs under the
Standing Committee of the NPC, who asked to remain anonymous, said
yesterday that the current Criminal Procedural Law, which was
enacted in July 1979 and revised in 1996, is ineffective.
He disclosed that legal experts were making a field study on the
revision of the law, but have not started drafting. The amendment
to the law will be submitted to the top legislature for
deliberation in 2006 and is expected to be voted on for adoption in
2007.
The current Criminal Procedural Law has 226 items. However, the
number of judicial interpretations and regulations making up the
law, formulated by the Supreme People's Court, the Supreme People's
Procuratorate and the Ministry of Public Security, exceeds
1,400.
The numerous judicial interpretations and regulations restrain
one another, undermining the authority of the law itself, said Chen
Weidong, professor of the?Renmin University of
China in Beijing.
Chinese law experts believe that the Chinese legislature's
decision to revise the law was primarily based on a report on the
implementation of the Criminal Procedural Law conducted by the
Standing Committee of the NPC in 2000.
Hou Zongbin, director of the Committee of the Internal and
Judicial Affairs of the NPC said in his report that the most severe
problem he found in his study of the implementation of the law in
six provinces is the use of torture to extract confessions.
He said Chinese courts have often reached verdicts heavily
influenced by the testimony of the accused. Policemen were
therefore prone to extort confessions through torture in order to
improve their rate of convictions.
Professor Chen Guangzhong, former president of the China
University of Political Science and Law, said that forced
confessions have become the biggest injustice in China's judicial
system. The law should be revised to establish the principle of
presumption of innocence and to allow lawyers to be present during
interrogations.
"If policemen conduct interrogations under the supervision of
lawyers, they would not dare torture suspects," said Xie Youping, a
professor at Fudan
University in Shanghai.
Police are generally hesitant to have lawyers present at
interrogations because they worry lawyers might leak important
evidence or teach suspects how to deceive policemen.
Various police bureaus have been selected to be trial locales
for lawyers to be present during interrogations. The experience
drawn from the trials will be important references for the revision
of the law.??
(Xinhua News Agency July 19, 2005)