China, which executes more people than any other country, is to hold open trials for a large number of death penalty appeals in an effort to better regulate executions, a legal scholar said on Monday.
From the second half of 2006, all death penalty appeals which go to a provincial high court will be heard publicly, a departure from the usual practice of closed reviews and probes, said Liu Renwen, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
The number of executions in China is a state secret, but Liu said he agreed with estimates in academic circles that the figure was likely to be about 8,000 a year. Rights groups have estimated the number at between 5,000 and 12,000.
With the judicial system under scrutiny after a series of widely publicised wrongful convictions, the Supreme Court has also moved to reclaim its right to final review of death sentences, but Liu said the policy was meeting resistance from lower courts.
"When the Supreme Court can take this power back is still a question," Liu told foreign correspondents.
"Local governments think it is a good tool to control public security. If they lose such power they think of course it would not be good," he said.
The top court has set up three branch courts to conduct reviews, a move officials say could cut executions by 30%.
But experts say it is still too short-staffed to handle all death penalty cases and, with its bid to curb lower courts' authority meeting opposition, Liu said making more death penalty trials public was another way of controlling the legal process for cases that could result in execution.
Several areas, including Beijing and Shanghai and the southern
province of Hainan, have already begun to hear appeals in public
trials, Xinhua news agency has reported.
The top court relinquished its review power during a crime-fighting
campaign in the 1980s. But lower courts, where judges are sometimes
not even law school graduates, have been criticised for arbitrary
sentencing.
Chinese were outraged by the case of a butcher executed for murdering a waitress who was later found alive, and that of a man who served 11 years for murdering his wife, who turned up not only alive but with a new husband.
Both cases were widely reported and put criminal justice at the top of the legal agenda.
But Liu said China's annual session of parliament, which opens on Sunday, was unlikely to make headway in legal reforms or to enshrine the Supreme Court's efforts to be the only court to handle death penalty cases.
"There are a lot of issues that need to be resolved, but I don't think such technical issues can be debated in parliament," he said.
Some 68 crimes in China can incur the death penalty, about half of which are non-violent offences, including corruption and financial crimes, Liu said.
Executions in China are carried out by a bullet to the head or by lethal injection.
