April 11, 2017
Chief Justice Zhou Qiang at the National People’s Congress in Beijing in March. In January, he railed against any notion that judges should be independent of Communist Party control.
Andy Wong/Associated Press
BEIJING — When Jia Jinglong, a villager in northern China, was executed late last year for killing an official he blamed for the demolition of his home, the news media boiled with debate about the death sentence. Mr. Jia’s family and lawyers argued that the official had victimized him and that his life should have been spared.
“The verdict against my brother was unfair,” Mr. Jia’s sister, Jia Jingyuan, said in an interview this week. “There’s a gap between the standards written in the laws and how those standards are enforced.”
A report released by Amnesty International on Tuesday suggests that such complaints of injustice are far from isolated but often remain muffled by official secrecy. That secrecy has undermined the Chinese government’s vows to limit death sentences, distorting how common executions are in China, the report said.
“This deliberate and elaborate secrecy system, which runs counter to China’s obligations under international law, conceals the number of people sentenced to death and executed every year, both of which Amnesty International estimates run into the thousands,” said the report, which is 44 pages long.
The Amnesty report is the latest addition to a debate among experts and advocates about how much to trust China’s claims that it has sharply cut the number of prisoners it executes.
China’s president, Xi Jinping, has harshly stifled political protest and has overseen a widespread crackdown on human rights lawyers. In January, the head of China’s courts, Zhou Qiang, railed against any notion that judges should be independent of Communist Party control.
But Mr. Xi has also promised to give ordinary citizens a fairer and more open legal system, and in recent years courts have exonerated prisoners who had been executed or had been given decades-long prison sentences for crimes that they had not committed.
In 2007, China’s highest court, the Supreme People’s Court, won back the power to review death sentences, in an attempt to make use of the penalty more consistent and to root out egregious injustices. Mr. Xi’s government has also promised much greater transparency about judicial decisions and standards.
Some foreign experts say that the number of executions in China appears to have dropped, even though the government does not issue statistics.
At the height a decade or so ago, China probably executed 10,000 or more prisoners a year, the Amnesty report said, citing a Chinese scholar quoted in a news report last year.
But the number executed annually is now probably in the “low thousands,” said Susan Trevaskes, a professor at Griffith University in Australia who studies China’s use of the death penalty.
“All major death penalty scholars in China say that death penalty decision-making has improved greatly since 2007,” Professor Trevaskes said by email. “I believe that the government has significantly reduced use of the death penalty since the mid-2000s.”
But China still executes far more prisoners than any other country, and the government’s refusal to release full records about death sentences has undercut its claims to have reduced executions, said the report from Amnesty International, which opposes all uses of the death penalty. Amnesty argues that the persistent secrecy easily conceals abuses and that any trend toward fewer executions could be reversed, depending on the political winds.
“There are no guarantees that the reforms adopted so far, even if they had led to a decrease in the number of executions, will prove effective in the long term or that they could not be reversed at some point in the future,” the report said.
The report found that an official website for Chinese court decisions, China Judgments Online, published records of only 701 defendants whose death sentences were approved by the Supreme People’s Court from the start of 2011 to the end of 2016, although the actual number of executions every year probably “runs into the thousands.”
Combing through Chinese news reports online, Amnesty found accounts of 931 people executed between 2014 and 2016, but only 85 of them also turned up in the court judgments database.
The gaps in the public records indicated that the Chinese government was not living up to its promises to be more transparent and consistent in how courts imposed death sentences, said William Nee, a China researcher in Hong Kong for Amnesty International, who helped write the report.
“The scale of the incompleteness makes it seem unlikely that it’s just an administrative oversight,” Mr. Nee said by telephone. “There probably is some sort of systematic concealment going on.”
The Amnesty report said that public reports of executions appeared to leave out many cases of death sentences for drug offenses and for terrorism-related crimes, especially in Xinjiang, the tense western region where the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority, have become increasingly estranged from the government.
Chinese courts have also announced death sentences against foreigners who have been convicted of smuggling banned drugs into China. Often these defendants are lowly drug couriers, and verdicts against them do not appear in the official court database, said Mr. Nee, the Amnesty researcher.
Court verdicts for Mr. Jia, the executed farmer, are among those that do appear in the open court records. One of his lawyers, Gan Yuanchun, said he had noticed a drop in death sentences in recent years and had successfully pleaded for reducing death sentences to prison terms in dozens of cases.
“There’s been an improvement in transparency in enforcement of the death penalty, but total numbers are still not disclosed,” Mr. Gan said by telephone.
But Mr. Jia’s case showed Chinese courts still lacked accountability, he said. The courts had ignored the evidence that Mr. Jia had been wronged by the official, who did not give him due compensation for his demolished home, Mr. Gan said. (The Supreme People’s Court publicly defended its decision to approve the execution.)
“Of course, that’s not an excuse to kill someone,” Mr. Gan said. “But in using the death penalty, you should consider the misdeeds of the victim.”
