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China may remove death penalty for some crimes

24 August 2010 18:20 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Grave robbers and panda smugglers would no longer face the death penalty under criminal code changes being weighed by China, home to the world’s most active executioners, APA reports quoting Los Angeles Times.

A committee of the National People’s Congress this week opened discussions on eliminating the death penalty as punishment for 13 crimes, including the smuggling of silver and gold, receipt fraud, tax cheating and the theft of fossils. Grave robbery and rare-animal smuggling are also among the crimes being considered for lighter sentences.

Although Chinese law guards information about executions as state secrets, the country is widely believed to put to death thousands of people every year. Even at conservative estimates, the annual toll of Chinese executions is higher than the rest of the world’s governments combined, Amnesty International reported this year.

The heavy use of capital punishment has drawn heated criticism from an international community leery of the human rights practices of an ascending China. Domestically, too, the government has been faced with an ongoing public debate over the death penalty, which has long been advocated by officials here as an effective deterrent against crime and chaos.

Human rights workers here and abroad greeted this week’s discussion of limiting executions with delicate and guarded optimism â€“ neither willing to ignore the symbolic importance of China scaling down its execution rate nor eager to overstate the number of lives likely to be saved.

"We need to support this new move because this is the future â€“ the abolition of the death penalty," said Teng Biao, a human rights lawyer and lecturer at the University of Politics and Law in Beijing. "For now, it’s just one small step forward."

But like other human rights workers, Biao pointed out that the revised criminal code could do little to erode China’s execution rate, since death has seldom been imposed as punishment for the crimes being considered for sentence revision.

In a move of protest against China’s policy of secret executions, Amnesty International this year refused to publish its estimate of how many Chinese people were put to death by the government.

Dui Hua Foundation, a San Francisco-based human rights group, estimates just under 5,000 people were killed last year; Chinese activists put that figure even higher.

The changes being debated would also do little to pierce the secrecy surrounding executions, said Joshua Rosenzweig, research manager at Dui Hua. "Its meaning is more symbolic than what it will accomplish in terms of actual numbers," he said.

Many observers argue that China is moving, albeit slowly, toward a more ponderous and humane judiciary. The Chinese high court must now review all death penalty cases, and confessions made under torture were recently declared inadmissible.

There is also a move toward the wider use of lethal injection, as opposed to the current death by gunfire.

But even if China goes through with the push to limit executions, the death penalty would remain on the books as a punishment for 55 crimes. Many of those are nonviolent offenses such as accepting bribes, making fake medicine, damaging public property and organizing prostitution.