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Death penalty under the gun in China
By Antoaneta Bezlova
BEIJING
- China, which executes more people than the rest of the
world put together, has held its first public discussion
of the death penalty, and legal experts have called for
its abolition.
While scholars in China have
debated the pros and cons of the death penalty for more
than 200 years, the battle of opinions has evolved into
a debate on how to limit the use of capital punishment
and gradually phase it out.
"Strict limitation
of death sentences and their gradual abolishment is the
mainstream view in China these days," said the
Guangzhou-based Southern Weekend newspaper, which
carried the first report of the conference held last
month in Xiangtan, Hunan province.
The
death-penalty conference gathered more than 30 legal
experts from China and abroad in what the paper said was
the first open discussion of the topic in the country.
However, the meeting did not make public any figures of
the number of people executed in China in past years.
From 1990 to the end of 2000, Amnesty
International documented more than 29,500 death
sentences in China and 19,500-plus executions, figures
believed to be far below the actual numbers.
Secret Communist Party documents published in a
new book, China's New Rulers, reveal that between
1998 and 2001, the police and courts killed some 60,000
people. This is equal to 15,000 deaths a year or 97
percent of the executions in the world.
China
does not report the number of executions in its
state-run press but tellingly, since its first "Strike
Hard" campaign against crime in 1983, the number of
crimes meriting the toughest punishment has more than
doubled from 32 to 73, including 28 economic crimes such
as smuggling, tax evasion and counterfeiting.
Until 1997, a person caught stealing as little
as 30,000 yuan (about US$3,600) could be tried and shot,
sometimes within a matter of weeks, but now the bar has
been raised to 3 million or 4 million yuan.
Supporters of retaining the death penalty argue
that it is a deterrent to crime, prevents recidivism and
rightfully metes severe crimes with proper retribution.
"It is much cheaper than imprisoning people for
the long term," argued one scholar quoted in the
Southern Weekend. "It only takes one shot or one
injection, while long-term jail sentences are a drain on
state coffers."
But critics are firing back with
counter-arguments. They point out that Hong Kong and
Macau, two former colonies - one was returned to China
in 1997 and the other in 1999 - have already abolished
capital punishment.
Of the developed countries,
only the United States and Japan continue to use the
death penalty.
Since China signed the United
Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights in 1998, opponents of the ultimate sanction have
gained the upper hand. They see the abolition of capital
punishment as a protection of the right to life and say
China should stop arbitrarily using capital punishment.
The death toll rose sharply during the Yan
Da (Strike Hard) campaigns, according to
human-rights activists. Initiated in 1983 by China's
late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping to counter the bad
impact of the country's opening to the outside world,
Yan Da were revived in 1996 by President Jiang
Zemin as a chief instrument to combat both rising crime
and corruption.
During these anti-crime
crackdowns, the country's legal institutions are
required to speed up normal legal procedures in order to
meet quotas for solved crimes. Death sentences are
carried out swiftly by a bullet to the back of the head
and many times in front of huge audiences in public
places such as stadiums.
But now many legal
experts say China needs to bring its practices in line
with those in the rest of the world.
"China is
preparing to ratify the UN treaty and in the future our
country's legal practices must come close to matching
international practices demanded by the covenant," said
Chen Zhonglin, law professor at Xinan Politics and Law
University.
"The death penalty is not a panacea
for crimes," said Li Yunlong, a defense lawyer who has
been campaigning against its arbitrary use for 18 years
and has written four books on the subject. "Many people
were executed during these Strike Hard campaigns but
China's crime and corruption are growing."
Even
ardent campaigners such as lawyer Li agree, however,
that it will take a long time for the authorities and
the public to stop seeing the death penalty as a
deterrent for crimes. Some say that the chief obstacle
to abolition is not the government but public opinion,
and that there is an urgent need for a national campaign
to educate the masses.
Professor Hu Yunteng of
the Supreme Court Policy Research Department said it
would take about hundred years to abolish the death
penalty gradually.
But Ma Chengshou, a law
professor from Xiangtan University, which hosted the
conference, suggested that abolition should take place
by 2020, when China is scheduled to reach the level of
xiaokang, or middle-class prosperity.
(Inter Press Service)
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