‘China is executing thousands’

: A leading rights group has dismissed China’s claims of transparency in revealing the extent of capital punishments it carries out, saying it remains a “deadly secret” as Beijing executes thousands of people every year and hides the numbers behind an “elaborate secrecy system”.

Rights group Amnesty International’s report, “China’s Deadly Secrets” released on Tuesday, says “hundreds of documented death penalty cases are missing from a national online court database that was initially touted as a “crucial step towards openness” and is regularly heralded as evidence that “the country’s judicial system has nothing to hide”.

The report contradicts what Chief Justice of Supreme People’s Court Zhou Qiang, China’s Parliament, and the National People’s Congress say.

Zhou said China’s courts “only handed out death sentences to an extremely small number of criminals for extremely severe offences in the past ten years”.

He said the capital punishment had been “strictly controlled and applied prudently since 2007”, when the SPC reserved the right to review all death penalty decisions handed out by lower courts.

Zhou, however, did not give an exact number of cases where death sentences had been applied. That is one of the main problems with the system, the Amnesty report says.

It indicates that China’s database deliberately contains information about only a fraction of death sentences the courts carry out each year “reflecting the fact that the Chinese government continues to maintain almost total secrecy over the number of people sentenced to death and executed in the country”.

The report added that AI “found only 701 individuals whose death sentences had been approved by the SPC between 2011 and 2016, while the organisation estimates that yearly the actual number runs into the thousands. “China consistently carries out more executions each year than any other country in the world,” it said.