The Chinese Criminal Defence System: A Comparative Study of a System in Reform (original) (raw)
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The Structure of the Chinese Criminal Justice System: A Comparative Perspective
2008
Though in many ways rooted in indigenous Chinese custom and political tradition, the Chinese legal system nevertheless bears the imprint of Western influence. This article uses the Chinese criminal justice system as the medium for exploring the foreign legal traditions -- particularly the civil law tradition of continental Europe and the socialist law tradition of the Soviet Union -- that have influenced the modern Chinese system of law. This Article examines six elements of the structure of the formal criminal justice system, placing special emphasis on those aspects of that system that are derived from, or analogous to, features of European or Soviet civil law. The six elements are: (1) the Organic Law of the People's Courts; (2) the Organic Law of the People's Procuracy; (3) the Code of the Criminal Law; (4) the Code of Criminal Procedure; (5) the Constitution of 1982; and (6) the opinions of the Supreme People's Court. [The article also includes English translations of these six elements.]The article argues that the major legacy bequeathed to the Chinese by the European and Soviet legal traditions is a judiciary which is neither expected, nor able, to exert significant checks or restraints on the arbitrary exercise of state power by the executive and legislative branches of government. The article also asserts that the structure of the formal criminal justice system contains many distinctively Chinese features the thrust of which is to inject flexibility into the criminal justice system so as to allow for the exercise of administrative discretion founded in and guided by political ideology.
Miscarriages of Justice and the Construction of Criminality in the People’s Republic of China
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Another high-profile miscarriage of justice was reported recently by the media in China, highlighting widespread issues concerning torture and other police malpractices within the Chinese criminal justice system. Drawing from analysis in my book on the Construction of Guilt in China, this Note outlines the key drawbacks of the Chinese criminal process which contribute to wrongful convictions, namely that none of the legal institutions exhibits the autonomy to check the credibility of the evidence impartially. Alongside the problems caused by miscarriages of justice, they are also indicative of the symptoms of a weak criminal justice system, thereby opening up opportunities for future reforms. Keywords: miscarriages of justice; China; criminal justice; case construction.
The Right to a Fair Trial in China: The Criminal Procedure Law of 1996
East Asia Law Review, 2007
Over a decade ago, the promulgation of the 1996 Criminal Procedure Law drastically improved the criminal justice system in China by introducing some key rights and procedural safeguards for criminal defendants. Unfortunately, in practice many of the rights introduced lacked real substance. The reforms were intended to introduce aspects of the adversarial system of justice to the historically inquisitorial system, however the safeguards introduced lacked the necessary guarantees to ensure compliance and the right to a fair trial is still far from a reality for China’s criminal defendants.
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China revised its Criminal Procedure Law in 1996 adopting an adversarial-style trial model and granting remarkable procedural safeguards to the accused. Many have been tempted to conclude that this new law is capable of ensuring fair trials for criminal defendants and thus could improve China’s record of human rights protection. This article will argue that, despite some progresses in formality, the new law has been poorly implemented and has failed to fulfill its promise of fair trials. This article will examine two high-profile cases in detail to demonstrate how procedural safeguards prescribed by the new law are frequently manipulated by judges, either to pursue efficiency and convenience or to accommodate outside influences such as political concerns, public outrage, personal friendship, or even bribes. These manipulations have caused the essence of fair trials intended to be created by the 1996 law to be largely nonexistent in modern proceedings, while at the same time allowing interferers to freely produce wrongful verdicts and disproportionate sentences. The reality is that many of these problems are caused by institutional flaws in China’s criminal justice system, particularly the absence of a responsible judiciary. However, instead of pinning hopes for reform on unrealistic constitutional changes, this article proposes a technical approach that focuses on restructuring the 1996 law to make criminal trials less vulnerable to manipulation and interference. This technical solution would help to ensure fair trials by relying on the procedure itself, rather than on unreliable judges.
International Journal of Law Libraries, 1980
On July 1, 1979, during the Second Session of the Fifth National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China (PRC), seven important laws were passed. Among these new laws were complete codes of criminal law and criminal procedure.The approval of these laws—particularly the codes of criminal law and procedure—is, to anyone with more than a casual interest in the PRC's legal system, an act of great significance. The Chinese themselves certainly view this event as being quite important and have devoted considerable time and effort to propagandizing its meaning for their society.
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To solve the low rates of witness testim ony in court, coercion, and other problems, the National People's Congress (NPC) created large-scale modifications in the criminal evidence rules when amending the Criminal Procedure Law (CPL) of the P eopl e's Republic of China (P.R. C) (1996 Revision) in 2012. Although the new criminal evidence rules have made remarkable
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In recent years, the legitimacy of China's criminal justice system has been increasingly challenged by the Chinese populace, in part due to the numerous exposed miscarriages of justice. The Chinese academic mainstream as well as the political and judicial authorities have looked towards the classical Anglo-American model of an adversarial criminal justice system to solve this problem. Reforms were subsequently introduced to add weight to court sessions and to provide external transparency of criminal trials, whilst curtailing the weight of pre-trial proceedings and the case file. Yet, these solutions have failed to restore the legitimacy of China's criminal justice. This book goes beyond adversarial dogmas and concentrates instead on internal transparency of criminal procedure, presupposing that in a criminal justice system such as that of China internal transparency of criminal procedure is a critical condition for external transparency and crucial to the achievement of legitimacy. The author proposes to nurture impartiality of public prosecutors and to emphasize internal transparency of criminal procedure. Prosecutorial control over the police and judicial checks on the procuratorates should be improved as well and active judicial investigation restored where necessary. External transparency, on the other hand, needs to be enhanced in a more cautious or internalized way.