China moves to stop confessions forced by torture

With torture of suspects in custody still widespread in China despite efforts to curb the practice, the government has again launched guidelines to stop forced confessions and exclude evidence collected in this way from legal cases.

China’s record on torture is proving an impediment to signing extradition agreements with many countries, something that has been pushed higher on the political agenda as President Xi Jinping’s government goes after fugitives overseas as part of its anti-corruption campaign.

Mr Xi has stressed the importance of improving China’s rule of law. At the same time, his administration has overseen stricter control of media and non-governmental organisations, and a crackdown on human rights lawyers and civil society reformers.

The new guidelines are a joint effort by the Supreme People’s Court along with the procuratorates, which are China’s highest organs of legal supervision, as well as the ministries of public security, state security and justice, and they seek to improve criminal procedure through better fact-finding, gathering of evidence, protection of rights and impartiality, the official news agency Xinhua reported.

Wrongly convicted

“Courts, procuratorates and police should co-operate to ensure innocent people are not wrongly convicted,” it said in the document, which is divided into 21 clauses.

“Clause five stipulates interrogations should be improved to prevent forced confessions. It also states that authorities must not oblige any person to incriminate themselves,” the agency reported.

In September, the government said the courts had strengthened their system of legal checks and balances and were making progress on human rights, and pointed to improvements such as fitting interrogation rooms with recording equipment to prevent torture.

In an Amnesty International report last year, the human rights group said reforms of the criminal justice system, which Beijing has hailed as human rights advances, had done little to reduce the use of torture.

Rights activists point out it is not just those in judicial detention who face torture. Harder to track down are the thousands of people who are held in what the United Nations calls “arbitrary detention” in government buildings, state- owned hotels or mental hospitals, known as “black jails”.

The UN Committee Against Torture has said “torture and ill-treatment is still deeply entrenched in the criminal justice system, which overly relies on confessions as the basis for convictions”.

The document emphasises presumption of innocence, and requires courts to acknowledge reasonable doubts of the facts constituting crimes.

It also identifies some major problems in the current litigation system, “putting forward a package of changes in the rules of evidence and investigation, and in the court’s key role: protecting the rights of all interested parties”.

The document reiterates many of the points made in recent months, which culminated in a policy document issued last month called the National Human Rights Action Plan, which runs to 2020 and in which China has said it will co-operate with the UN Human Rights Council, a group that has frequently censured Beijing.