No change seen in China's use of death penalty amid broad public support

2015-04-02

Amnesty activists hold banners outside the South Korean consulate during a protest marking World Day Against the Death Penalty in Hong Kong, Oct. 10, 2011. AFP

China's ruling Chinese Communist Party "kills in secret, and with political motives," according to London-based rights group Amnesty International, and is unlikely to change its approach in the foreseeable future, analysts said on Thursday.

According to Amnesty, at least 2,466 people were sentenced to death in 2014, 28 percent more than in the previous year, while 607 executions were recorded worldwide.

But the figures don't include death sentences and executions in China, where the authorities are still believed to execute more prisoners than the rest of the world combined.

However, authorities in the troubled northwestern region of Xinjiang did publish news of at least 21 executions in 2014, via the country's official media reporting on a year-long "strike hard" anti-terrorism campaign, the report said.

"Three of them [were] condemned to death in a mass sentencing rally at a stadium in front of thousands of people," Amnesty International's report said.

But it added: "We stopped publishing estimates for the number of executions in China in 2009, as it is impossible to verify figures while the death penalty system in China remains a state secret."

Sichuan-based rights activist Huang Qi said Beijing is more likely to publish information about death penalties and executions in ethnic minority regions where there are widespread public fears over violence and instability.

Numbers kept secret

But the Communist Party is extremely careful not to let people know exactly how many officials are executed for corruption, compared with ordinary people convicted of violent crimes, Huang said.

"The Chinese public would want to compare the figures for executed corrupt officials with those for common criminals," Huang said.

"[This would support] the view that the Chinese legal system protects officials, and doesn't regard them as ordinary people."

But Huang said there is still widespread public support within China for the death penalty, especially for officials.

"Life may be of higher value than anything else, but the Chinese public is still broadly supportive of executing officials," he said.

Huang said the government has expressed interest in moving towards a more transparent system for reporting on the death penalty, however.

"I think that the likelihood of China publishing its death penalty statistics in the next couple of years isn't very high," he said. "They would want to wait until the situation in Xinjiang stabilizes."

Deterrent to crime?

Hubei-based rights activist Song Xiangfeng said there is a widespread public perception that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to growing crime rates in China's cities.

"There is a lot of chaos in society right now, and certain kinds of crime are rampant," Song said. "Most people, especially people in cities, believe that the death penalty can act as a brake on crime."

"The bigger the city, the higher the crime rate, and most ordinary people think that crime should be severely punished."

Bob Fu, founder of the U.S.-based Christian rights group ChinaAid, said executions in China are used to instill fear in the population at large.

"Killing on a large scale is a common occurrence for the regime," Fu said. "Killing is normal."

"There has been no change in this attitude in recent times, very little change at all."

"Even though executions are kept secret, everybody knows they take place, and the key element of a dictatorship is terror," he said.

"The figures may be secret, but the act itself isn't a secret."

Link to other abuses

U.S.-based pro-democracy activist Yang Jianli said the commonplace use of executions by a regime is often linked to wider human rights abuses.

"In China, there is also the question of organ-harvesting from still-alive executed prisoners," Yang said. "Some of China's transplanted organs still come from executed prisoners."

"Prisoners on death row aren't executed according to due legal process, but suddenly, because on that day there was a need for a transplant organ," he said.

Chinese official figures revealed that some 65 percent of transplant organs came from executed prisoners in 2009.

According to state media, human organ transplants will rely from Jan. 1, 2015, on voluntary public donations and on donations from living relatives.

But activists say the measures may be largely cosmetic, as some 300,000 patients are placed on waiting lists for organs every year in China, with only one patient in 30 ultimately getting what they need.

Human rights researchers have warned that "voluntary" donations can still be coerced out of death row prisoners, who are under the total control of the authorities.

Reported by Wen Jian for RFA's Mandarin Service, and by Ho Shan and Wei Ling for the Cantonese Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.

Link to original story on RFA website