Responsive Image

China’s rights debate

National Post, 12 March 2012

The following is an excerpt from an editorial in The Wall Street Journal.

Beijing’s rubber-stamp legislature was presented with a revised Criminal Procedure Law recently, giving the public its first look at what is almost guaranteed to be the final wording of this controversial legislation. Missing from the law was a provision found in earlier drafts that would have allowed the police to hold suspects incommunicado and in secret locations. That represents progress, but it’s hard to say how significant the change will be.

That’s because the existing Criminal Procedure Law also doesn’t allow authorities to “disappear” suspects, yet the practice is common. The current law does provide for “residential surveillance,” which is supposedly a less severe form of detention than jail. But authorities have stretched the meaning to justify holding dissidents and human rights lawyers for months.

Such violations of the law are part of a long-standing phenomenon that professor Jerome Cohen has dubbed China’s “two criminal processes.” The majority of defendants are tried in accordance with the law. Yet when it comes to prosecuting political cases, authorities throw the law out the window.

The new Criminal Procedure Law offers some hope. The government released 99 draft amendments to the law last August, many of which offer new procedural safeguards.

More importantly, the proposed revision of Article 73, allowing “residential surveillance,” instantly sparked public debate. And for the first time, public consultation on a proposed criminal law made a difference.

The real test will come the first time the police disappear somebody under the new law. Human rights lawyers can argue that it’s illegal by pointing to the fact that the government backed down from legalizing it.

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/China+rights+debate/6286393/story.html