BEIJING, (Reuters) – China’s Communist Party pledged yesterday to speed up legislation to fight corruption and make it tougher for officials to exert control over the judiciary, even as it stressed full control over the courts.
The decision, released by the official Xinhua news agency, was reached at a four-day party meeting, or plenum, last week.
The party said it would “prevent extorting confessions by torture” and prevent miscarriages of justice with a “timely correction mechanism” following a series of corruption investigations involving torture that have outraged the public.
The plan to prevent forced confessions, which had been flagged last year, is aimed at preventing abuses under the party’s anti-corruption watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.
Some legal cases have illustrated the brutality of a secretive detention system for party members, known as “shuanggui”, and the drive to get confessions as President Xi Jinping presses on with an aggressive anti-corruption campaign.
Lawyers had raised questions about the legality of the process, calling it unconstitutional.
The party said it would “uphold” the Political and Legal Committee, a secretive body overseeing the security services that many lawyers have blamed for interference in legal cases.
“They are not ready to move forward with abolishing the institution and I think that will be a problem in future,” said Bo Zhiyue, an expert on Chinese politics at the National University of Singapore’s East Asian Institute.
Legal scholars had hoped the party would reform the Committee, which they say would be a repudiation of former domestic security chief, Zhou Yongkang, who is under investigation for corruption and has been blamed for much of the abuse of the rule of law.
The party promised the separation of local powers from the courts through the establishment of courts spanning administrative regions but it stressed the judiciary would remain in its grip.
Xi said in a speech to the party that its leadership was “the most fundamental guarantee of socialist rule of law”.
The moves, made after last week’s closed-door meeting of the party’s elite, are pivotal to the workings of China’s market economy, the world’s second largest. They come as slowing growth raises the prospect of more commercial disputes.