Attaching great
importance to safeguarding human rights through perfecting
legislation, ensuring an impartial judicature and strictly
enforcing the law, China has made considerable progress in
building a judicial guarantee for human rights.
It is a principle of the
Chinese Constitution and the basic program of managing state
affairs of the Chinese government to run the country
according to law. Over 390 laws and decisions involving
legal problems have been formulated by the NPC and its
Standing Committee, more than 800 administrative laws and
regulations by the State Council, and 8,000-plus local laws
and regulations by the local people's congresses since the
initiation of reform and opening-up. As a result, a fairly
complete legal system has taken shape, with the Constitution
as the core. There are laws covering all fields of social
life, providing a comprehensive judicial guarantee for the
various human rights of the citizens. To improve the legal
sense of the administrative law executors and judicial
personnel at various levels and the sense of the rights and
duties of the citizens, China has actively carried out
publicity stressing the rule of law and mass activities
promoting knowledge of the law. Some 750 million people in
China have participated in activities involving the study of
laws, over 280 special lectures on the legal system for
leaders at the provincial or ministerial level have been
held with an accumulative total of 12,000 participants, and
184,000 leaders at the prefectural or departmental level
have received regular legal training in the past five years.
China punishes criminal
offenses in accordance with the law, and protects the safety
of citizens' lives and property and other human rights from
infringement. In 2000, the public security and judicial
organs adopted forceful measures to crack down on serious
crimes of violence in accordance with the law, such as
crimes with gangster connections and characteristics, crimes
involving the use of guns and explosives, and gang-related
crimes, as well as frequently occurring criminal activities
such as theft and robbery. They also punished, according to
law, a handful of criminals who caused deaths or gathered
people to upset the public order by organizing and using the
Falun Gong cult, effectively safeguarding social stability
and the people's lives and property.
To deepen the reform of the
judicial system, courts at various levels have strengthened
the administration of justice and law enforcement, actively
implemented the system of choosing and appointing presiding
judges and individual jurors, fully carried out the system
of public adjudication, perfected the judicial
rehabilitation system, and further intensified the internal
supervisory and circumscribing mechanism of the courts and
the mechanism for correcting errors, thereby effectively
safeguarding impartial justice. In 2000, China's courts
tried or handled over 560,000 criminal cases at the first
instance, in which more than 640,000 criminals were
sentenced; over 3.41 million civil cases at the first
instance; more than 1.31 million cases involving economic,
intellectual property and maritime affairs; 2,447 cases
involving state compensation; 86,614 administrative
lawsuits, including 13,635 cases involving the revocation of
inappropriate administrative practices by administrative
organs, or 15.74 percent of the total number; and cleared
over 138,000 cases exceeding the trial time-limits, and some
475,000 long-pending cases, basically liquidating the
arrears of cases and effectively safeguarding the legitimate
rights and interests of citizens, legal persons and other
organizations.
To earnestly
guarantee that persons in financial difficulty can exercise
their litigation rights according to law, the Supreme
People's Court formulated the Regulations on Providing
Judicial Assistance for Litigants Actually in Financial
Difficulty in July 2000 to improve the judicial assistance
system. According to the Regulations, in dealing with civil
and administrative cases involving litigants actually in
financial difficulty, especially the elderly, women, minors,
the disabled persons and laid-off workers pressing for
payment of alimony, the costs of maintenance and upbringing,
pensions for families of deceased persons and old- age
pensions, or for payment of medical costs and acquisition of
material compensations for victims of traffic or industrial
accidents and faulty medical treatment, payment of
litigation costs may be postponed, reduced or remitted in
accordance with the law. In 2000, courts across the country
made decisions on such costs in more than 190,000 cases.
Procuratorial organs have
reinforced litigation supervision according to law to
improve the quality of handling cases and safeguard the
legitimate rights of citizens. In 2000, procuratorial organs
throughout the country placed 4,626 criminal cases involving
misconduct by judicial personnel on file for investigation
according to law; put forward 14,349 rectification opinions
against public security organs adopting improper mandatory
measures and other law-violating actions; corrected cases of
exceeding the time-limit of summoning criminal suspects for
detention at the investigation, suing and adjudication
stages, 64,254 person-times; protested 3,798 court decisions
and rulings on criminal cases, which were regarded as wrong,
and 16,944 court decisions on civil administrative cases;
and put forward rectification opinions against illegal
commutation, release on parole or medical parole, 9,318
person-times. In the meantime, procuratorates have actively
carried out nationwide a system of the main-suit procurator
assuming full responsibility for handling cases, selected
main-suit prosecutors through competition, and based on
this, carried out the reform of public prosecutions, and
trial-implemented the systems of public investigations of
non- prosecution cases and the demonstration of evidence
before the court -- all these have gone a long way toward
safeguarding impartial justice and the legitimate rights and
interests of criminal suspects.
The lawyer system and the
system of legal assistance have been constantly improved,
and are playing an increasingly important role in
safeguarding the rights of citizens and promoting impartial
justice. At present, there are over 9,500 lawyers' offices
and more than 110,000 lawyers in China. In addition, 92
foreign law firms and 28 Hong Kong law firms had been
allowed to set up offices on the Chinese mainland by July
2000. In 1999, lawyers throughout the country handled
1,364,000 lawsuits; in 2000, they participated in the
defense of over 310,000 criminal cases, and provided legal
assistance for criminal suspects at the criminal procedure
and investigation stage in more than 170,000 cases. By the
end of 2000, China had established 1,853 legal assistance
organs at various levels, with 6,109 full-time personnel in
their employ. In 2000, more than 170,000 cases of legal
assistance were handled in China, in which over 228,000
persons received assistance, and 830,000 persons were
offered consultancy on law-related problems, thus protecting
the legitimate rights and interests of the poor, weak and
disabled and other litigants.
China protects, in accordance
with the law, the legitimate rights of prisoners, and has
achieved remarkable results in reforming criminals. The
recurrence rate of prisoners released at the end of their
terms has remained between 6 and 8 percent for many years, a
very low rate compared to those of other countries. To
strengthen the supervision of the law enforcement of prison
staff, the people's procuratorates at various levels have
further improved the system of establishing resident
agencies and offices in prisons throughout the country. In
1999, the Ministry of Justice began to carry out a
three-year education program to improve the basic qualities
of the prison police. As a result, their level of law
enforcement has been markedly improved.
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