Suicides could spell trouble for prosecutors
Print Edition
CHINESE prosecutors are to be punished if officials they are investigating for abuse of office commit suicide, authorities have said, following the deaths of several suspects caught up in the government’s anti-graft drive.
The campaign has ensnared a long list of senior and junior officials. Some have committed suicide, escaping possible criminal proceedings and seizure of ill-gotten gains, to the benefit of their families.
In the latest example, the head of a multi-billion-dollar state-owned heavy machinery manufacturer was found hanged in his office as anti-corruption investigators probed his firm.
Business news outlet Caixin said in January that at least 50 officials had been publicly declared to have died of “unnatural causes” since 2012.
The Supreme People’s Procuratorate has issued a directive of “eight bans” restricting how investigations into acts of abuse of office, which often involve bribery or other forms of corruption, should be carried out.
Investigators will be suspended and “dealt with according to discipline and the law” if the subjects of their inquiries escape, are injured, or commit suicide because of their “unlawful” or “severely irresponsible” acts, it said in a statement on its website.
Prosecutors are also banned from accepting money from companies under investigation, unreasonably imposing coercive measures, or obtaining confessions through torture.
“The eight bans are prosecutors’ code of conduct in their participation in the fight against corruption,” the statement said.
“They will help build an anti-graft system that ensures justice, transparency and standards, and improve the effects and credibility of the anti-corruption campaign.”
It vowed “zero tolerance” for violations of the rules, warning prosecutors and the police that the bans were “high voltage cables” that no one should “dare to touch.”
In 2013, five Party anti-graft investigators and a prosecutor in Wenzhou were sentenced to four to 14 years in jail for drowning a state-owned company official reportedly stripped and held under water in a bid to extract a confession.
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