In 2002, the Danish Institute for Human Rights (DIHR) supported a conference on death penalty, held in Xiangtan city in central China. Our partner was in Beijing, so we were a bit surprised about the location our partner had chosen for the conference.
We were told that with such a sensitive topic, it was good not to be in Beijing – the political centre – or in a big famous city on the East Coast, but in a faraway, ‘small’ town with a local university. Participants of the conference were Chinese scholars and legal practitioners as well as foreign specialists on death penalty issues.
Talking with the local partners, we understood that they were all for the abolition of the death penalty, but as that was thought to be unrealistic, they had chosen a three-step strategy.
First, they would advocate for an organizational reform under which the Supreme Court would get the mandate for reviewing and confirming all death penalty sentences in the country. Second, they would work for a revision of the Criminal Law in which the number of death penalty crimes would be reduced from the present 68. Third, they would begin to discuss abolition of the death penalty. The plan was thus first to reduce the number of actual executions before talking about whether to retain or to abolish this form of punishment altogether.
The discussions at the 2002 conference were heated and several of the speakers questioned the strategy and asked why the organizers did not immediately work for abolishment. Others advocated against abolishment and suggested keeping the punishment, but to administer it in a more lenient and flexible way.
There were about 70 participants in the conference, but the meetings were held in an auditorium in the law faculty, so many students came and went, listening for a while. It was clear that they were mostly on the abolishment side, and they clapped and shouted when this was proposed by a speaker.
We were told that this was the first conference on death penalty in China supported by foreign funding. Two years later, in 2004, we supported a similar conference in another city in central China, Chongqing, and the basic three-step strategy was the same and seemed to have broad support among the scholars present. One scholar furthermore presented a timeline, ending with abolishment of the death penalty in 2050.
In effect from January 2007 a new regulation transferred the power to review all death penalties to the Supreme Court. Observers had estimated that this would bring the number of executions down by 30 percent. The number is a state secret, so this is impossible to verify. But experts among the Chinese lawyers estimate that is has gone down more than 50 percent, even though it is ‘still too high’.
On 23 August 2010, a proposal for revision of the Criminal Law eliminating the death penalty for 13 offences was discussed in China’s legislature, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress.
So now we are waiting for the next steps….
We were told that with such a sensitive topic, it was good not to be in Beijing – the political centre – or in a big famous city on the East Coast, but in a faraway, ‘small’ town with a local university. Participants of the conference were Chinese scholars and legal practitioners as well as foreign specialists on death penalty issues.
Talking with the local partners, we understood that they were all for the abolition of the death penalty, but as that was thought to be unrealistic, they had chosen a three-step strategy.
First, they would advocate for an organizational reform under which the Supreme Court would get the mandate for reviewing and confirming all death penalty sentences in the country. Second, they would work for a revision of the Criminal Law in which the number of death penalty crimes would be reduced from the present 68. Third, they would begin to discuss abolition of the death penalty. The plan was thus first to reduce the number of actual executions before talking about whether to retain or to abolish this form of punishment altogether.
The discussions at the 2002 conference were heated and several of the speakers questioned the strategy and asked why the organizers did not immediately work for abolishment. Others advocated against abolishment and suggested keeping the punishment, but to administer it in a more lenient and flexible way.
There were about 70 participants in the conference, but the meetings were held in an auditorium in the law faculty, so many students came and went, listening for a while. It was clear that they were mostly on the abolishment side, and they clapped and shouted when this was proposed by a speaker.
We were told that this was the first conference on death penalty in China supported by foreign funding. Two years later, in 2004, we supported a similar conference in another city in central China, Chongqing, and the basic three-step strategy was the same and seemed to have broad support among the scholars present. One scholar furthermore presented a timeline, ending with abolishment of the death penalty in 2050.
In effect from January 2007 a new regulation transferred the power to review all death penalties to the Supreme Court. Observers had estimated that this would bring the number of executions down by 30 percent. The number is a state secret, so this is impossible to verify. But experts among the Chinese lawyers estimate that is has gone down more than 50 percent, even though it is ‘still too high’.
On 23 August 2010, a proposal for revision of the Criminal Law eliminating the death penalty for 13 offences was discussed in China’s legislature, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress.
So now we are waiting for the next steps….