Access to Justice
At a meeting of high court judges in mid-December, Supreme People’s Court President Xiao Yang reportedly instructed courts to strengthen rights protection and ensure that innocent people are not prosecuted in the course of efforts to fight crime and maintain social stability (China Court Net, 12/16). Echoing Xiao’s statement, the China Daily published an editorial on December 18 calling for stronger measures to protect human rights as law enforcers and courts launch a long-term crackdown to counter China's crime wave.
In a revealing article originally published in October 2004, the Beijing Review examines three major issues in China’s evolving legal profession: the problem of corruption, the threat of official retribution faced by defense lawyers, and the prospect of amendments to the PRC Lawyers Law that may enhance the independence of lawyers associations.
According to a 21st Century Business Herald report originally published in August 2004, the Beijing justice bureau effectively canceled a multi-year study on the work environment for Chinese criminal defense attorneys in 2002 after initial research revealed major problems. Scholars and lawyers in Beijing launched the research in an attempt to determine the extent of the hardships that Chinese defense attorneys face in representing their clients. In the first phase of the study, researchers sent comprehensive surveys on criminal defense work to 2,000 lawyers in and around Beijing (considered to have a better than average work environment for defense attorneys by Chinese standards) and received nearly 600 responses. According to the article, the initial results “shocked people,” with one observer noting that the problems were worse than they thought possible.
According to a January 13 report on the China Court Net, the Xinhui District People’s Court in Jiangmen city has convicted a Guangdong defense lawyer for evidence fabrication and sentenced the lawyer to two years in prison. The defense lawyer allegedly presented fabricated documents at a corruption trial and encouraged his client and a witness to give false testimony. An intermediate level people’s court upheld the sentence.
According to articles appearing in both the Legal Daily and on the website of the Ministry of Justice, the State Council has "in principle" approved amendments to the 1995 Regulations on Letters and Visits. The "letters and visits" (xinfang) system is an extrajudicial process of appeal centered on numerous petition bureaus scattered throughout the Chinese bureaucracy.
Precise details on the amendments are lacking, and presumably will be released once the final versions are approved. According to a report appearing in the South China Morning Post, the proposed amendments would exclude grievances related to the judicial system from the xinfang system.
The following translation was retrieved from the State Bureau for Letters and Visits Web site on October 23, 2009. The Chinese text was retrieved from the State Bureau for Letters and Visits Web site on October 23, 2009.
Regulations on Letters and Visits
Decree of the State Council of the People's Republic of China
No. 431
In a commentary published in the Procuratorial Daily, Wang Songmiao reviews the implementation of China’s State Compensation Law (SCL) in the ten years since it became effective. The SCL establishes a legal right to monetary compensation when administrative or criminal justice organs violate certain rights of individuals or legal persons.
According to articles in the Beijing News and the Legal Daily, the Ministries of Justice and Construction have issued a joint notice instructing legal aid offices to step up their efforts to provide assistance to migrant workers who seek payment of back wages.
According to articles in the South China Morning Post (subscription required), Beijing News, and the People’s Daily, the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) has rebuked two Beijing academics who authored broad-ranging judicial reform proposals. The proposals involved significant changes to both the SPC death penalty review and the internal organization of the courts.
In a recent report, a domestic Chinese Web site described the absurd obstacles that a group of seven Shenyang farmers have faced over the past two years in challenging the compensation paid to them when they were evicted from their farms to make way for urban construction. After being bounced back and forth among provincial and national-level bureaus without any result, the farmers finally decided to sue the Ministry of Land and Resources (MLR) in August of this year (see related story here).