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.