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China to overhaul legal system

Pallavi Aiyar

Citizens to be entitled to rights defendable in a court of law

— PHOTO: AP

FAR-REACHING REFORMS: Chinese President Hu Jintao (centre) and National People's Congress Chairman Wu Banguo (right) at the 4th plenary session of China's National People's Congress in Beijing on Tuesday.

Beijing: Recent reforms of China's capital punishment laws should lead to a discernable reduction in the numbers of those executed, the country's Chief Justice, Xiao Yang, said on Tuesday. The Chief Justice was presenting a report at the ongoing session of the National People's Congress (NPC), China's Parliament.

"Resolutely carry out the policy of strict and solemn control to ensure the death penalty is applied only for an extremely small number of crimes and execute criminals according to the law only where the damage to society has been very severe and the evidence is sufficient," Justice Xiao said in his report.

Corruption cases

As of January of this year, the sole right to hear death penalty appeals was returned to China's Supreme People's Court after a gap of more than two decades.

In other comments, the Chief Justice announced that 23,733 cases of embezzlement, bribery and dereliction of duty were handled by the courts in 2006.

Official corruption has been at the centre of a crackdown in the past year with several prominent party members and officials coming in the line of fire. The most prominent amongst these were the former head of the National Statistics Bureau, Qiu Xiaohua, and the former director of the State Food and Drug Administration, Zheng Xiaoyu. A total of 825 government officials were convicted of corruption last year. Admitting to corruption within the judicial system itself, the Chief Justice said 292 judges were found to have "abused power for personal interests" in 2006 of which 109 of them were given "criminal penalty according to law."

Mr Xiao announced that Chinese courts heard and concluded 17,769 cases of intellectual property rights (IPR) infringement in the last year. The laxity of China's IPR protection has come in for much criticism from western firms and governments. The U.S. Government, for example, estimates that piracy within China costs U.S. companies $20-24 billion a year in damages, a figure that rises to $50 billion if European and Japanese firms are included.

China is currently in the midst of an attempted overhaul of its legal system. The Government's stated aim is to create a "rule of law" in which citizens are entitled to legal rights, defendable in a court of law.

While multi-party democracy remains off the agenda, China's leadership is pushing the idea that the country is to be ruled according to law rather than bureaucratic fiat, as in the past.

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