ABSTRACT
China’s highest court will regain the power to decide on all death sentences under legal changes approved Tuesday [31 October] . . . The move to recentralize control over executions in the hands of the supreme court beginning 1 January [2007] comes as the authorities face mounting criticism from human rights groups and Chinese legal scholars for what they say is the widespread and arbitrary use of the death penalty. Chinese courts have been embarrassed in recent years after a number of widely reported miscarriages of justice in which evidence later emerged that innocent people had been executed . . . The National People’s Congress approved the amendment to the law, which ‘is believed to be the most important reform of capital punishment in China in more than two decades’, the official Xinhua news agency said in a short dispatch. In an attempt to deter a wave of crime and corruption in the early years of China’s economic boom, the authorities in 1983 delegated the power to lower courts to impose the death penalty for a wide range of offences . . . Legal experts say that as living standards rise and China becomes an important international power, the country’s senior leadership is uncomfortable that the death penalty is so readily applied. China does not disclose the number of executions it carries out under a criminal code where almost seventy offences carry the death penalty . . . Amnesty International estimates, based on publicly available reports, that at least 1,770 people were executed in 2005 and 3,900 were sentenced to death. Some Chinese legal experts estimate that as many as 8,000 people are executed each year. In a 21 September report Amnesty said shortcomings in the legal system for people sentenced to death included the lack of prompt access to lawyers, the absence of the presumption of innocence, political interference in the courts and the use of evidence by torture.
