China’s legislature approved revisions yesterday to a key criminal law that at least on paper will restrict police powers to secretly detain people, a tactic increasingly used against activists and government critics.
The changes to the criminal procedure law were the most high-profile ones passed on the last day of the annual National People’s Congress. The Chinese Communist Party-controlled body also approved a budget for this year that calls for a boost in domestic consumption to keep the economy expanding while overseas markets remain weak.
While legal reformers have mostly applauded the revisions to detention rules, saying they will offer better protection of suspects and reflect increasing awareness in China of the need for stronger detainee rights, legal enforcement in China is another matter.
Police and prosecutors routinely ignore current legal provisions protecting suspects’ rights and have frequently used charges of endangering national security against dissidents.
The revision is seen as an incremental move and is not seen as leading to major changes in China’s authoritarian one-party system, despite occasional calls for political reform.
At his annual news conference yesterday following the session’s close, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) repeated vague reform calls, saying they were needed to solidify the achievements of three decades of economic growth and prevent a repeat of the chaos that rocked China during the violent 1966 to 1976 Cultural Revolution.
“Without a successful political structural reform ... new problems that have cropped up in China’s society will not be fundamentally resolved and such historical tragedies as the Cultural Revolution may happen again,” Wen said. “I know very well that the reform will not be an easy one. The reform will not be able to succeed without the consciousness, the support, the enthusiasm and creativity of our people,” he said.
The Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) failed experiment in radical egalitarianism, led to the deaths and persecution of millions, upended the nation’s leadership, and fostered broad cynicism about the communist system. China’s leaders, many of whom suffered grave hardships during that period, routinely hold it up as justification for strict political and societal control.
As before, Wen offered no specific proposals, saying reform had to adhere to China’s particular national circumstances and proceed in a “step-by-step manner.” Chinese leaders often define political reform in terms of boosting administrative efficiency, but even those paltry efforts at streamlining have gained little traction against an entrenched bureaucracy and struggle for influence ahead of this fall’s generational leadership transition.
The approval of the revised criminal law by a vote of 2,639 to 160 ends months of speculation and debate about whether the government would give police the legal authority to do something they have long done extralegally: disappear people for months at a time without telling their families.
Police have increasingly used the tactic over the past year to detain activist lawyers, democracy campaigners and even internationally acclaimed artist Ai Weiwei (艾未未), amid government worries about whether the popular uprisings of the Arab Spring might spread to China.
There are two relevant articles in the new law that deal with notifying families, one in regular criminal cases and the other involving a type of detention known as residential surveillance. Both have been revised to better protect detainees, though they do not do away completely with secret detentions, analysts said.
In the case of residential surveillance, a sort of house arrest that can happen in a fixed location chosen by police, a detainee’s family must be notified within 24 hours unless they cannot be reached. Dissidents detained under this kind of residential surveillance are often put in suburban hotels or apartments and many have reported being tortured by police.
Beijing human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang (浦志強) dismissed the legal tinkering, saying arbitrary enforcement and lack of independent oversight rendered such changes meaningless.
“I can’t get very excited about any new provisions legalizing types of detention. The authorities have always operated just as they pleased without regard to rules,” Pu said, citing the ongoing and still-unexplained detention of figures such as blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng (陳光誠) and Liu Xia (劉霞), the wife of imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波).
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