China’s chief justice, Xiao Yang (肖扬), held forth on the nation’s legal system in his annual report to the legislature on Monday, delivering mostly praise but also an indictment. First, the good news (from AP via IHT):

China’s top judge said Monday that the country’s courts have successfully restricted the use of the death penalty to only the most serious crimes.

…Xiao Yang said the change had resulted in death sentences only for an “extremely small number of extremely serious and extremely vile criminals posing a grievous threat to society.”

In his report to the annual session of the National People’s Congress, China’s rubber stamp legislature, Xiao gave no statistics on the number of death sentences handed out in 2007.

China’s communist government treats the number of executions as a state secret, despite assurances in Xiao’s report for greater transparency in legal matters.

Now the bad (from Reuters):

China’s top judicial official said on Monday the country faces a big gap between citizens’ growing demands for legal protection and a court system struggling with inefficiency and poorly trained judges.

“We must also soberly understand that there remains quite a stark contradiction at present between people’s constantly growing demands on the judiciary and the abilities of the people’s courts,” he told parliament.

According to the AP account of Xiao’s report, Chinese courts have tried nearly three and a half million people over the last five years, roughly a 20-percent jump from 2002, with 760,000 convicts receiving sentences between five years in prison and death over that time.