China urged to do more on death penalty reforms

BEIJING, Nov 1 (Reuters) Human rights groups today welcomed changes to China's death penalty law with reservations, urging the country to disclose the number of people it executes and embrace broader legal reforms.

China, which executes more people than the rest of the world combined, said yesterday the Supreme Court would reclaim its right to final review of death sentences from January 1, ending the practice of allowing executions on the order of lower courts.

''Unless the government discloses how many people it executes each year, the reform isn't meaningful,'' Sophie Richardson, deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

The New York-based group estimated that China executes about 10,000 people a year. Other estimates put the figure at between 5,000 and 12,000, and the penalty can be imposed for 68 crimes, including non-violent offences such as tax fraud.

Amnesty International welcomed the change, which has been resisted by local governments who see executions as a way to curb crime and maintain social order, but warned it could further entrench the death penalty system unless accompanied by broader reform.

''We hope this is a step towards full abolition of the death penalty,'' Amnesty's Asia-Pacific programme director, Purna Sen, said in a statement.

''It is only by abolishing the death penalty that China can guarantee that innocent people will not be put to death.'' 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. She too turned up alive and with a new husband.

But Chinese analysts said it was often the public that put pressure on local authorities to secure convictions, feeling that murderers should pay with their own lives.

The Supreme Court has set up three new trial courts to conduct the final reviews of death penalties upheld by provincial high courts, which have been ordered to hear all death penalty appeals in open trials from July 2006.

Reuters MS DB1030