Beijing – China’s highest court must approve all executions under legislation enacted Tuesday, prompting human-rights activists to express hope the country will reduce its world-leading use of the death penalty.
The amendment to China’s capital-punishment law follows reports of wrongly convicted people being executed and criticism that the death penalty has been imposed arbitrarily by lower courts.
China is believed to carry out most of the world’s court-ordered executions, putting to death hundreds, and possibly thousands, of people each year for crimes ranging from murder to such nonviolent offenses as tax evasion.
“Clearly the changes are going in the right direction,” Mark Allison, a Hong Kong-based researcher for Amnesty, said of the new legislation, which takes effect Jan. 1.
“But we’re still calling for China to go further – to abolish the death penalty.”
China’s official Xinhua News Agency hailed the amendment as “the most important reform of capital punishment in China in more than two decades.”
The change “deprives the provincial people’s courts of the final say on issuing death sentences,” the agency said.
“Death penalties handed out by provincial courts must be reviewed and ratified by the Supreme People’s Court.”
The change adopted by the legislature Tuesday enshrines last year’s announcement by the Supreme People’s Court that it would start reviewing all death sentences, ending a 23-year-old practice of giving the final review to provincial courts.
Jerome Cohen, an American expert on Chinese law, called the new law “encouraging and significant” but said the next challenge will be enforcing the change.
“The court has been working hard to recruit a sufficient number of judges. It’s proving to be slow going,” Cohen said. “That itself tells you what a huge burden it is to adequately review the large number of death sentences.”
Details about criteria for reviewing death sentences have to be worked out, he said.
True number unknown
Amnesty International says China executed at least 1,770 people in 2005, but the true number is thought to be many times higher. In a statement Tuesday, the London-based rights group cited a senior member of China’s national legislature as saying some 10,000 people are executed each year.
By Amnesty’s figures of known executions, China was responsible for more than 80 percent of the 2,148 people executed last year. Sixty were executed in the United States.
