No labor camps in correction system
Print Edition
China’s community correction program will not become a new form of “re-education through labor,” Vice Minister of Justice Zhao Dacheng said yesterday.
Zhao was responding to concerns expressed at a press conference about how community correction would work after the labor camp system, or laojiao, was abolished. He said practices used under the laojiao system would not be part of the community correction program.
A key Party policy document published earlier this month said laojiao was being abolished as part of a major effort to protect human rights. The system had empowered police to sentence petty criminals to up to four years’ confinement without going through the courts.
Zhao said community correction would be based on the provisions of criminal law and extended to people on probation, parole or those given light punishments or short sentences.
He said the biggest advantage of the new system was that offenders did not have to leave the social environment they were familiar with, or their families. “So their thoughts and emotions can be stable and they can have better living and working conditions,” Zhao said.
Under the community correction program, a convicted person will not be held at a special venue but required to receive rectification education in their own community. This was an obvious difference from laojiao, he said.
According to a document issued at the press conference, as of the end of last month the community correction program, first put into trial use in 2003 and launched nationwide in 2009, had received 1.67 million convicted people and more than a million had completed it.
The program acts as a part of the country’s policy of “justice tempered with mercy,” Zhao said.
He also said the ministry would be improving the legal aid program for underprivileged groups.
Last year, more than 1.4 billion million yuan (US$229.7 million) was used to provide legal aid, according to the document. The ministry will work to make the program available for more people and the quality of services will also be improved, Zhao said.
He told reporters there were 235,000 lawyers in China and the number was expected to exceed 240,000 by the end of the year.
A new revision of the Criminal Procedure Law had reiterated suspects’ rights to hire lawyers for the defense.
“The ministry is talking with the Supreme People’s Court, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate and the Ministry of Public Security about regulations regarding lawyers’ rights to defend, to guarantee the legal rights and interests of the suspects,” Zhao said.
China is also to make administrative information about the country’s prisons more widely available, a move to support judicial reform.
Information should be open to criminals, their relatives and society at large, helping to promote civilized law enforcement, Zhao said.
Information concerning the rights and interests of inmates, prisoners’ assessment, punishment and parole, as well as prison administration procedures should also be publicized.
The vice minister also pledged further efforts in reducing the use of the death penalty.
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