Full defence for all accused
All criminal defendants to be assigned lawyers under pilot project
BEIJING: China will expand nationwide this year a pilot project assigning criminal defence lawyers to represent defendants in criminal cases who don’t have lawyers to protect their human rights, a senior official from the Justice Ministry said.
In October, the Supreme People’s Court and the Justice Ministry jointly decided to conduct the pilot programme for all criminal defence cases in eight provinces and municipalities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Henan and Guangdong.
“We will expand the programme across the country this year, after summing up successful experiences from the pilot programmes,” Zhou Yuansheng, director of the Department of Directing Lawyers and Notarisation at the Justice Ministry, said.
Zhou said after the new measures are in place, there will be an estimated increase of 400,000 criminal defence cases each year.
Data provided by the ministry show that since October, the courts in Hangzhou, Ningbo and Wenzhou, all in Zhejiang province, have accepted a total of 2,007 free legal aid cases, including 733 criminal defendants who were assigned lawyers providing free legal services, accounting for 36.52%.
“Providing full criminal defence to accused people – a major incentive to promote judicial reform – has played an essential role in safeguarding the suspects’ legitimate rights, and effectively avoids miscarriages of justice,” Zhou said.
According to China’s Criminal Procedural Law, if the accused peo- ple are minors, disabled or have mental problems or if they may face execution or life imprisonment and they don’t hire a lawyer, courts will notify the legal aid centres under the justice departments to assign lawyers for them.
One typical example occurred in November, when a suspect surnamed Gong, was accused of rape, and was prosecuted in Xiangshan County People’s Court.
Gong could not afford to hire a lawyer and the court notified the Xiangshan County Legal Aid Centre to send a lawyer to represent him.
Zhuang Runwei from the Huaheng Law Firm was assigned to defend Gong.
During the trial, Zhuang’s defence statement claimed the facts of the case were unclear and the evidence was not solid.
The court finally adopted the lawyer’s defence statement and Gong was convicted of home invasion rather than rape.
Zhou said the pilot areas should improve support systems and adopt effective measures to protect legitimate rights of criminal defence lawyers, while standardising their professional behaviour.
Moreover, relevant authorities, including the courts, justice departments and lawyers’ associations in pilot areas, will establish a coordinating and cooperative mechanism, under which they will regularly meet for information sharing, strengthening supervision of work flow, making detailed deployments and solving existing problems, he said.