The Chinese gov­ern­ment is plan­ning to imple­ment judi­cial reforms that could sharply reduce its use of the death penal­ty. China will restrict the use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment by requir­ing its high­est court, the Supreme People’s Court, to review all death penal­ty cas­es before exe­cu­tions are car­ried out. Currently, the high court reviews only a minor­i­ty of such cas­es, allow­ing the provin­cial courts that hand down death sen­tences to review their own judg­ments. ​“Criticism of the legal sys­tem in soci­ety is ris­ing. The Chinese Communist Party, as a rul­ing par­ty that attach­es impor­tance to sta­bil­i­ty, knows that if it does­n’t reform the judi­cial sys­tem, it would be bad for sta­bil­i­ty,” said Liu Renwen, a schol­ar of law at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. China, which does not release sta­tis­tics on death sen­tences or exe­cu­tions, has long been crit­i­cized for its high num­ber of exe­cu­tions. Based on state-run media reports, Amnesty International esti­mat­ed that China con­duct­ed 1,060 exe­cu­tions in 2002 and 2,468 exe­cu­tions in 2001. A recent book about the Chinese lead­er­ship cit­ed inter­nal par­ty doc­u­ments when it report­ed that about 15,000 exe­cu­tions took place every year between 1998 and 2001. Occasional cas­es of inno­cent peo­ple who have been exon­er­at­ed from China’s death row have shak­en the gen­er­al pub­lic’s con­fi­dence in China’s death penal­ty sys­tem. (Washington Post, January 18, 2004) See International Death Penalty.

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