ShareThisBy GEOFFREY YORK
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Despite promises of judicial reform, China's courts are still imposing guilty verdicts on more than 99 per cent of all defendants in criminal cases, a new report says.
The latest report, covering more than six million cases in the past eight years, finds that 99.34 per cent of defendants were convicted by the courts. It strongly suggests that the Chinese justice system is still weighted overwhelmingly against anyone who becomes enmeshed in it.
The statistics were revealed this week by People's Court Daily, a government newspaper, in an article that heaped praise on the Chinese court system for its "improved quality and efficiency" and its "legal protection of human rights."
Reform of the Chinese justice system is "getting deeper continuously" and improving "step-by-step," the article says. But this claim was contradicted by the statistics. The acquittal rate for defendants has failed to make any substantial improvement in recent years, remaining as low as it always has been.
The latest report will undermine Beijing's efforts to portray itself as a reformer. The government recently announced, for example, that it will require the Supreme Court to review all death-penalty sentences, a measure that could lead to a decline in executions. But China is expected to remain the world's biggest executioner of prisoners, as many as 10,000 annually. Human-rights groups have concluded that China executes more prisoners than all other countries combined.
The problem is the government's heavy-handed control of the Chinese court system. Judges are essentially bureaucrats who can be hired and fired by local officials, so they lack any real independence. They rule in favour of the prosecuting authorities in almost every case.
Defense lawyers, meanwhile, are intimidated and weakened by government pressure. Many have been arrested, prosecuted or stripped of their license to practice. During the past year, a crackdown on dissidents has led to the detention of several prominent lawyers, along with a series of personal attacks, even assaults, on others.
"This alarming trend raises serious concerns about the Chinese government's commitment to its stated goal of establishing a rule of law," the independent U.S.-based organization Human Rights in China concluded in a report this summer.
"Through official efforts to use legal and extra-legal means to silence and control public dissent and unrest, this crackdown further calls into question the openness and fairness of the Chinese judicial system and the future of an independent bar in China."
A new government policy, issued this year, will require all defense lawyers to be guided by the authorities on any case involving 10 or more people. The policy will force the lawyers to "discuss the case fully" with the "relevant judicial departments," a signal that the lawyers should accept the government's decisions.
The Chinese media have exposed a series of wrongful convictions and wrongful executions in the past two years, putting pressure on the authorities to reform the judicial system. In one case, an innocent 20-year-old man was executed for a murder that he did not commit. Ten years after his execution, another man confessed to the crime.
