Proposed amendments to China’s Criminal Procedure Code of 1996 have been circulated, prior to submission to the National Peoples Congress for approval. They have been hailed by government spokesmen as “more humane, with greater attention being paid to the protection of citizens’ civil rights.” The revisions, government spokesmen added, have “strengthened, not weakened human rights protection.”
There is good reason to be skeptical about these pronouncements, given the rather depressing aspects of criminal law enforcement in China. In the five years after the 1996 Criminal Procedure Law became effective, 142 criminal defense lawyers were arrested, including 77 lawyers who were illegally detained or beaten. China executes thousands of its citizens each year. Chinese Criminal Procedure Law is “widely regarded as an important … instrument of the Communist Party to institute social and political order,” writes Mike Chu in “Criminal Procedure Reform in the People’s Republic of China: The Dilemma of Crime Control and Regime Legitimacy.”
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