China Continues to See High Execution Numbers

Posted June 25, 2009

Amnesty International's recent estimates of world executions pegged China as responsible for over 1700, or 72% of the world's executions for 2008. Eva Pils, a REVIEW contributor and assistant professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong, met with REVIEW Multimedia Producer Saul Sugarman and discussed these numbers and the criminal process within China. According to Ms. Pils, while the criminal process has improved in China, she does not see the rate of executions dramatically decreasing any time soon.

Are the execution numbers in China higher or lower than Amnesty International's predictions?

We don't actually know how high the numbers are; they are a state secret. But there is little doubt they are very high. Looking at the number of executions relative to the size of the population, it seems that—according to the very uncertain figures that we have—China is currently only being surpassed by Singapore, and not by a very large margin.

What are some reasons that China has such high execution numbers?

Executions are quite cheap in China. Certainly if you execute a few thousand people per year, you could say that the death sentence is something like a real possibility for crime.

The criminal process leading up to the execution in China can be very short and it can be very flawed. China has an authoritarian government. Why would it abolish the death penalty? There is no way of legally challenging the death penalty as such in China. That, of course, means that the political and—in a way—the economic costs of retaining the death penalty are quite low.

Why is China so secretive about its numbers?

Chinese academics have suggested that perhaps one reason why execution rates are treated as a state secret is simply because it's embarrassing. They're too high. Recent efforts to reduce the number of executions led a scholar to speculate that perhaps if we can continue on this good track of reducing execution rates, there might be a day when the Chinese government can afford to let the number become public because it's no longer that embarrassing.

What flaws has the criminal process seen and how has it improved in China?

There was always supposed to be a review process (for executions). The problem was that the power to carry out this review was delegated to the provincial high people's courts and that in effect meant they were reviewing, in many cases, their own decisions. So it was a kind of on-paper procedure that added nothing to the appeal level.

A procedure has been reinstituted in the Supreme People's Court, the highest court in China, that adds a layer of scrutiny to any death sentence metered out by a Chinese court. It is a review process that allows the Supreme People's Court to either confirm a death sentence or to remand cases to the trial or appeal court level when it believes that the facts or the law have been wrongly understood or wrongly applied.

But are there other areas where the process still needs improvement?

There was this claim that prisoners' organs were being used for organ transplants. The problem with that, of course, was even assuming you obtained some sort of consent from people who were about the be executed, you would have to ask how valid the consent was under the circumstances of someone being held on death row in jail.

The worrying possibility that scientists, including physicians in and outside China, raised was that these organs might have been produced on demand. That would have meant that the executions might be carried out in the sense that the timing of the executions and perhaps the circumstances of the execution would be made to fit with the medical demands of carrying out an organ transplant.

In 2007, China agreed to restrict the use of executed prisoners' organs to transplants that were for other family members of those prisoners. That, of course, would greatly reduce the possibility of a kind of trade in organs.

Saul Sugarman is a multimedia producer for the REVIEW.