March 22, 2004

By Amnesty International

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Introduction

This document describes the process that someone suspected of committing a capital crime goes through under the Chinese criminal justice system, from detention through to execution. This process will be described using examples of cases researched by Amnesty International, and others monitored in the official press in China.

As will be seen, there is potential for the violation of human rights at every stage of the criminal justice process leading to execution. For example, access to immediate legal representation upon detention and adequate opportunity to prepare a defence thereafter is frequently denied; there is an ever-present risk of torture or other forms of ill-treatment to extort a confession which can then be used in court; verdicts and sentencing can be determined by internal committees before any trial hearing; defendants do not have the right to cross examine witnesses during trials, which are often curtailed; and an appeal can be rejected following a summary examination of a case by judges behind closed doors. Convicts are then subjected to the ultimate cruel and inhuman treatment – execution and the denial of the right to life.

Article 5 of ECOSOC Implementation of the Safeguards Guaranteeing Protection of the Rights of Those Facing the Death Penalty (1989/64): Urges Member States to publish …information about the use of the death penalty, including the number of persons sentenced to death, the number of executions actually carried out, [and] the number of persons under sentence of death …

Article 212(5) of the 1996 Criminal Procedure Law of the People’s Republic of China states: Execution of death sentences shall be publicly announced …

The People’s Republic of China continues to regard statistics on the death penalty as a “state secret” despite internationally accepted instruments requiring all countries still using the death penalty to publish statistics on its use.

It remains, therefore, impossible to know the number of people executed each year by the Chinese state. Since the 1990s, Amnesty International has published an annual log of reported death sentences and executions in China, compiled mainly through monitoring media reports. For example, the organization monitored reports of 1,060 executions in China in 2002, but the true total is certainly far higher. Only a fraction of death sentences and executions carried out in China are publicly reported, and the extent and detail of the information selectively released by the relevant authorities fluctuates widely year by year. Amnesty International’s figures therefore reflect levels of reporting rather than underlying trends.

A partial illustration of the shortfall between the reports and reality is given by the following example: According to Amnesty International’s monitoring, 17 people were executed in Yunnan Province in 2002. However, in March 2003 the official press reported that Yunnan Province had acquired 18 mobile execution chambers – buses bought and converted at a cost of 500,000 Yuan (US$60,000) each in which lethal injections are administered to convicts.(1) It is highly unlikely that 17 executions per year in the province could justify investment in a fleet of 18 such vehicles.

According to one estimate based upon internal Chinese Communist Party (CCP) documents, 60,000 people were executed in the four years from 1997-2001, an average of 15,000 people per year, although this figure includes extra-judicial killings, such as those killed during police operations including pursuit and apprehension.(2) Should this be the case, it would mean that the Chinese state chooses to execute or otherwise kills one person for every 86,000 head of population. The 1,060 judicial executions in China in 2002 recorded by Amnesty International is far more than the total executions recorded in the rest of the world combined; but if the figure is close to 15,000 per year, it would imply that China, with the largest population in the world, kills a higher proportion of its citizens than any other country, apart from Singapore which has one of the smallest populations.(3)

Chen Zhonglin, director of the law academy at Southwestern University of Politics and Law who is also a senior national legislative delegate from Chongqing Municipality, said on 15 March 2004 that China executes “nearly 10,000” people every year. When this figure was reported in the national and international media, Chen was quick to clarify it was an estimate based upon tabulations by scholars and other senior legislators, and did not represent an official figure.(4)

Chen’s estimate came in the wake of pronouncements made by senior officials on the need to reduce the number of executions in China. However, if statements on reducing the number of executions are to be taken seriously, it is incumbent on the Chinese government to regularly publish full statistical information on its use of the death penalty.

Another major concern of Amnesty International linked to the extensive use of the death penalty is the inadequacy of the Chinese criminal justice system. The conduct of the Chinese police, procuratorate and judiciary consistently fail to meet international human rights standards. Moreover, officials in the criminal justice system consistently disregard due procedure under China’s own national laws, encouraged and facilitated by the authorities with national and regional “strike hard” campaigns. These profound failings are exacerbated yet further by a de-centralised legal administration operating well in excess of its capacity, and therefore prone to serious errors.

National and local “strike hard” anti-crime campaigns provide the context for accelerated rates of executions in China. The current national “strike hard” campaign started in April 2001. Luo Gan [罗干], a politburo standing committee member and director of the Central Committee for the Management of Public Security, has urged security organs to “…continue to adhere to the ‘strike hard’ principles” in on-going security work.(5) Luo Gan also called for the campaign to be extended for another year on 18 July 2003,(6) although it is unclear whether this resulted in an actual policy decision for the campaign to continue on a national level. Xiao Yang [肖扬], president of the Supreme People’s Court, also called in December 2003 for the campaign to continue in response to continually rising levels of crime in China.(7)

“Any crime which the law regards as serious should certainly receive serious penalties, and any crime which is punishable by the death penalty according to the law, should certainly receive the death penalty. This will ensure the healthy progress of strike hard.”

Hu Jintao, former Secretary of the Standing Committee of the CCP Central Political Bureau (Legal Daily 4 May 1996), now President of the People’s Republic of China and Chairman of the CCP.

According to official national statistics, the conviction rate for all crimes for the five years from 1998 to 2002 was 99.1%.(8) An almost ‘perfect’ conviction rate is deeply worrisome in the context of factors demonstrated in this document, such as increased detentions and arrests, torture to extort confessions, restricted access to legal representation, the absence of a presumption of innocence, extreme pressure on the police, procuratorate and courts to secure convictions during “strike hard”, and courts passing guilty verdicts through a sense of political obligation and a desire to maintain resolve rather than rigor. Under such circumstances, miscarriages of justice are inevitable, and it is possible that people are executed ‘in error’ on an almost daily basis.(9)

Amnesty International opposes capital punishment on the grounds that it constitutes the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment, and violates the right to life. Its effectiveness as a unique deterrent to crime has never been proven,(10) and with levels of crime continuing to rise in China, its irrelevance to crime control and prevention cannot be ignored. As ever more countries in the world remove the death penalty from their penal codes, its abhorrence is becoming ever more widely recognised. Amnesty International cites violation of the right to life as proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and numerous other international human rights instruments as grounds for the death penalty to be abolished.

To this end, and in light of the severe and systemic failures in the police, procuratorate and judiciary’s processing of capital cases described in this document, Amnesty International calls upon the People’s Republic of China to impose an immediate moratorium on the use of the death penalty.

A note on sources

The examples of abuses of power and miscarriages of justice reproduced throughout this document from the Chinese media are presented in order to show ‘the tip of the ice-berg’, and to expose them to a wider international audience. They will be supported by other relevant examples of human rights violations from Amnesty International’s own research, and by drawing upon the published research of other governmental and non-governmental organisations. A small amount of information in this document was sourced from confidential sources, and will not be referenced to protect the identity of those sources.

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