China's top public prosecutors' office, the
Supreme People's Procuratorate, yesterday pledged to take
tougher measures to tackle unlawfully extended custody, a major
source of human rights violations against criminal suspects.
"We are determined to expose the problem, solve the problem,
invite the public to supervise our job and therefore better protect
the rights of citizens," said Zhao Dengju, deputy
procurator-general of the top public prosecutor's office.
It occurs sometimes that criminal suspects are held at detention
centers until the court makes its final judgment. This means that
the police, public prosecutors and judges could all illegally hold
a suspect in custody for longer than is allowed.
The legal period of custody of criminal suspects ranges from 14
days to six-and-a-half-months between the arrest and the trial,
according to China's Criminal Procedure Law. The public
prosecutors' offices have the function of checking such
misdeeds.
Some criminal suspects are sometimes held in custody for longer
than the legal time limit due to either a dereliction of duty or
corruption among the police, public prosecutors or judges.
Jian Shumou, a resident of central China's Henan Province, was
one of these victims, according to sources with the highest public
prosecutor's office.
These local policemen arrested Jian earlier this year for being
allegedly involved in some criminal activities, although the public
prosecutors sources refused to identify these.
The local public prosecutors did not approve Jian's detention as
a result of insufficient evidence. And the local
reeducation-through-labor agency did not put Jian under its
charge.
However, Jian was unlawfully held in custody for three months
instead of being released on time according to law.
The local public prosecutors' office later charged one of the
policemen who played a major role in Jian's unlawfully extended
custody for alleged false imprisonment.
This case was part of the efforts by public prosecutors' offices
across the country to root out unlawfully extended custody.
In a two-month major national campaign carried out by Zhao's
office from early May, a total of 359 cases of unlawfully extended
custody were exposed and resolved.
"We will further enhance the awareness of human rights
protection and procedural justice and set up a long-term mechanism
to prevent and correct possible cases of unlawfully extended
custody in the future," he said.
Chen Ruihua, a professor at the Law School of Peking University,
said that the protection of suspects' rights was vital in order to
prove that justice was being done.
Chen added that unlawfully extended custody shows an extreme
indifference for basic human dignity and freedoms.
Zhao's office yesterday also opened two hotlines and an e-mail
address for public complaints regarding unlawfully extended
custody.
The two hotlines are 010-6865-0468, 010-6525-2000 and the e-mail
address is cyjb@spp.gov.cn.
（China Daily July 23, 2003）