China proclaims big fall in executions after court reforms

Tania Branigan on why the number of people excecuted in China has fallen

Only "extremely vile criminals" were executed in China last year, the country's most senior judge declared yesterday, lauding the success of efforts to curb the death penalty.

The decline, estimated by independent analysts to be as great as 30% year-on-year, is thought to be the result of so-called "kill fewer, kill carefully" reforms introduced in early 2006, which gave the supreme court the right to overturn capital sentences handed down by lower courts.

Human rights groups welcomed the fall as a sign of progress, but pointed out that no one knew the actual number of executions because it was a state secret. Even going by reported cases, China executes more people annually than the rest of the world combined.

"It's a step in the right direction, but we still have a long way to go," said John Kamm, executive director of the US-based Dui Hua Foundation, an advocacy group for non-violent political prisoners. He said the group's research suggested about 6,000 people were executed last year, 25-30% fewer than in 2006.

Amnesty International recorded 1,010 executions in China in 2006 on the basis of published reports alone, which was still two-thirds of the global total. It believes the real number may have been closer to 8,000.

Xiao Yang, chief justice of the supreme people's court, gave no figures for the overall use of the death penalty or the decline as he delivered his annual report. Speaking to the annual session of the national people's congress, he said capital sentences were imposed on an "extremely small number of extremely serious and extremely vile criminals posing a grievous threat to society". Last week, a senior judge at the supreme court, Huang Ermei, said it had rejected 15% of death sentences passed by lower courts. But in an interview with the official website China Peace Web she stressed that China would not have the right conditions to abolish the death penalty "for a considerable period of time".

The changes were in part introduced to allay public disquiet at high-profile miscarriages of justice, but also reflect the lobbying of lawyers, academics and some officials for broader legal reforms.

Xuan Dong, who sentenced more than 1,000 people to death as a judge before quitting to work at the King & Capital law firm in Beijing, argued that the reforms had ended a long era of "heavy use" of the death penalty. "Last year was the second phase - death penalties seriously controlled. The third will be the phase where it disappears completely, but this still needs a very long time," he said. Chen Weidong, a professor of law at the Renmin University of Beijing, said that while 68 crimes still carried the death penalty, it was now being used mostly for serious violent offences. Amnesty International said: "No one who is sentenced to death in China receives a fair trial in accordance with international human rights standards. Failings include lack of prompt access to lawyers, lack of presumption of innocence, political interference in the judiciary and failure to exclude evidence extracted under torture."

Xiao also warned yesterday that courts were struggling to keep up with more cases and people's higher expectations of the legal system. "We're seeing worsening contradictions between the ever-rising legal demands from the masses of the people and the relative incapacity of the people's courts," he said.