From Chinese law specialist Stanley Lubman, for the Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time blog:
A tragic but true story has been used to support a change in Chinese criminal procedure. Zhao Zuohai was acquitted after serving 10 years in jail for murdering a neighbor. He had confessed to the crime, was sent off to jail but, ten years later, his “victim” turned up alive. Three policemen who had obtained his confession – which turned out to have been coerced — have been arrested. Now, new rules have been announced limiting the use of torture, one of the most offensive human rights violations common in Chinese criminal procedure.
Late last month two guidelines that promise to limit the use of torture by police and prosecutors in criminal cases were issued by no less than five Chinese organizations concerned with law enforcement, the Supreme People’s Court, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of State Security, and the Ministry of Justice.
They are welcome reforms in practices that were long forbidden under the Criminal Law (Section 247) and Criminal Procedure Law (Section 43) adopted in 1997, which forbid the use of torture, but without addressing the consequences for the use or exclusion of evidence obtained through torture. Although China is a nation in which a legal system is being created in remarkably short time, criminal law and criminal procedure remain the branches of the law most in need of reform, and the process of reform has been painfully slow.
