EU-China Relations and the Death Penalty

With the EU’s political and trade relationship with China being actively discussed, Amnesty International today releases its latest report on the use of the death penalty in China and calls on EU foreign ministers meeting today to actively consider the report, which calls for an immediate moratorium on executions in China.

“Executed according to Law The death penalty in China“is available, see links at end of page.

The report details how the Chinese government routinely abuses national laws and international standards in the course of executing thousands of people each year. Amnesty International says the rights of individuals facing the death penalty are violated at every stage of proceedings, including confessions obtained under torture being used as evidence against them (see individual cases below).

The report comes a week after a senior Chinese legislator suggested China executes 10,000 people a year. This is higher than the number of judicial executions recorded for the rest of the world combined. As well as promoting lethal injections as a method of execution, mobile execution chambers (converted buses) are being extensively used throughout China in which prisoners can be executed immediately after a sentence is passed.

“We are releasing this report today to coincide with the meeting of EU foreign ministers in the hope that they will take the issues raised into account when recommending how the EU’s future relationship with China should be handled,” Dick Oosting, Director of Amnesty International’s EU Office, said.

“As in previous years, its human rights dialogue with China is an excuse for the EU not to put forward a resolution at the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva criticizing China’s human rights record. It is also likely that today’s meeting of foreign ministers will release conclusions on China that will be far less detailed than those of previous years.”

“However, the EU has always stressed that dialogues should produce concrete results and assured that the dialogue with China would not prevent public scrutiny of human rights issues. Given today’s Amnesty International report and the general picture of persistent gross abuse across a broad spectrum of human rights in China, these assurances seem very thin,” Dick Oosting said.

Amnesty International therefore calls on EU foreign ministers to recommend the active promotion of a moratorium on the death penalty in China and to live up to the EU’s own guidelines both on the death penalty and human rights dialogues by promoting a resolution at the UN Commission on Human Rights calling for such a moratorium.

BACKGROUND
Amnesty International’s report demonstrates the failures in China’s criminal justice system by using cases researched by Amnesty International, and cases gathered from China’s official media.