Criminal Justice
According to a BBC report, China's Communist Party has warned its members that corruption and incompetence could threaten its hold on power.The party's Central Committee said in a policy paper that Communist rule could not be taken for granted.
Lu Jianping, a professor at China's People's University, is quoted in a Xinhua article as saying that, while it is possible to use China's regulations on crimes relating to national security to address subversion on the Internet, practice has shown that crimes like this generally cause greater harm to society when they are committed via the Internet. Professor Lu therefore expressed the belief that such crimes should be brought within a distinct "Internet crime" framework. Professor Lu stated that China is currently behind some developed nations in its Internet crime legislation activities, and that he believed Chinese criminal law experts would use international exchanges, such as the International Criminal Law Conference which recently convened in Beijing ( co-sponsored by the International Association of Penal Law and the Chinese Law Society), to introduce foreign trends into Chinese Internet crime legislation.
Shi Jiangtao of the Post reports on an announcement by the Supreme People's Court that fraud in China's major state-owned banks will continue to be punished severely. The cases which elicited the statement by SPC vice-president Shen Deyong involved three defendants who had been officials of the China Construction Bank in Zhengzhou and the Bank of China branch in Zhuhai. Shen announced that the court had upheld their death sentences.
Bill Savadove of the South China Morning Post reports that dissident Li Guotao has been put under house arrest. Li hoped to use the week during which the plenary meeting of the 16th CCP Congress is taking place in Beijing to gather support for his effort to abolish the system of reeducation through labor. In response, the Shanghai police searched his house, confiscated his computer, and detained him for seven hours in the local police station. Li is now under house arrest. Li was one of the original founders of the China Democracy Party, as well as the Association for Human Rights and has in the past served seven years in the reeducation through labor system for these activities. Savadove reports that the accusation against Li is: "disseminating inappropriate opinions during a special time".
Legal scholars and officials from more than 68 countries gather in Beijing this week for the 17th International Conference on Penal Law. Co-sponsored by the International Association of Penal Law and the Chinese Law Society, the conference will address such subjects as trafficking, computer crime, juvenile justice, corruption, criminal procedure and jurisdiction questions. The conference comes as Chinese scholars and officials debate amendments to the PRC Criminal Procedure Law and reform of the criminal justice system.
On September 14, China's high court held a press conference to call attention to the connection between financial fraud and official corruption and abuse of office. Shen Deyong, vice-president of the SPC, said that the increasing size and number of such crimes may eventually come to undermine social stability.
In a speech given before a conference on prison reform, Zhang Fusen, Chinese Minister of Justice, emphasized the need to continue the process of seperating the administration of Chinese prisons and enterprises using prison labor. Their fusion is the source of much criticism regarding corruption and abuse in the Chinese prison system. Prisons in 14 provinces have been included in the experimental reform efforts, first launched in January 2003.
The Daily Information News reports that in June, the Xinjiang High Court led a public appraisal of written legal judgments handed down in the region's lower courts. The high court recommended that judgments be drafted to reflect not only the legal resolution of each case but also the human logic of the result. A representative of the court explained that such judgments promote popular legal understanding and help mend strained human relationships.
Reuters reports that a court in Guangdong province has sentenced Li Yuanjiang, former editor-in-chief of the Guangzhou Daily newspaper, to twelve years in prison for accepting more than $60,000 in bribes over a period of nearly ten years.
Li's sentence comes on the heels of the release of Cheng Yizhong, a former editor of the Guangdong-based Southern Metropolitan Daily, whom Chinese authorities held for more than five months without charge. Citing journalists in Beijing, Reuters reports that Cheng is now virtually under house arrest.
Li Minying and Yu Huafeng, two of Cheng's colleagues at the Southern Metropolitan Daily and its parent company, The Southern Group, were sentenced in March to jail terms of 12 and 11 years respectively (reduced on appeal to 8 and 6 years).
Radio Free Asia reports that the Southern Metropolitan Daily's former deputy editor-in-chief and Southern Group general manager Yu Huafeng and former editor Li Minying are currently appealing their jail sentences, which were already slashed from 12 and 11 years to eight and six years respectively by the Guangzhou Municipal Intermediate People’s Court on appeal in June.