CHINA: China is re-examining its speedy and widespread use of the death penalty following a number of high-profile miscarriages of justice, and experts say planned changes could cut the number of executions by nearly a third.
Although Beijing does not publish statistics on the number of executions every year, human rights groups say China executes more people than all other governments put together. Amnesty International believes there were 10,000 executions in China last year.
This week, a top legal official said China's supreme people's court would reclaim the power to review death sentences from lower courts in order to avoid wrongful executions. Some legal experts say slowing down the rate at which the death penalty is administered could cut the number of executions by 30 per cent.
Supreme court vice-president Wan Exiang said China's top court would introduce three extra criminal trial courts to handle reviews of the death penalty. In 1983, China's parliament, the National People's Congress, said provincial courts could carry out the reviews to allow them to speed up the number of convictions.
China has 68 capital offences, including smuggling, tax evasion, corruption and anti-government activities, as well as murder and rape.
Executions are carried out by a bullet to the back of the head or by lethal injection.
But Mr Wan ruled out the possibility of scrapping capital punishment. "The question is almost beyond discussion in China because the millennium-old notion of murderers paying with their own lives is deeply ingrained in people's minds," Mr Wan said.
The death penalty has become a major debating point on the streets, in internet chat-rooms and, increasingly, among lawyers and academics.
Tales abound of suspects being picked up on flimsy evidence, tortured into spurious confessions and then executed quickly, only for the real culprit to emerge later.
In Hebei province, Nie Shubing was executed in 1995 for raping and killing a woman after he confessed under torture. His innocence was discovered last month when the real killer was arrested for other crimes.
She Xianglin, a man in Hubei province, was freed after 11 years in jail when he was wrongfully convicted for killing his wife who had turned up alive in March.
There have been widespread calls for greater independence in the Chinese legal system, which still does not have a jury system, and many people complain it is prone to corruption.
In April, the top appeals court in the southwestern province of Sichuan issued what it claimed was the first ruling in China barring confessions obtained through torture.
And there are also economic reasons why China is rethinking the death penalty for some crimes. Law experts have called for it to be dropped as a punishment for non-violent crimes, to make it easier to extradite 4,000 suspected corrupt officials who have fled abroad with €42 billion in stolen funds.
The UN high commissioner for human rights, Louise Arbour, said the UN would work with China to eradicate obstacles to allow China to ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
But she criticised China for the lack of reliable data on the number of executions, saying "transparency is critical for informed public debate on the issue".