China may limit death penalty

BEIJING – Grave robbers and panda smugglers would no longer face the death penalty under criminal code changes being weighed by China, home to the world’s most active executioners.

A committee of the National People’s Congress this week opened discussions on eliminating the death penalty as punishment for 13 crimes, including the smuggling of silver and gold, receipt fraud, tax cheating and the theft of fossils. Grave robbery and rare-animal smuggling are also among the crimes being considered for lighter sentences.

Although Chinese law guards information about executions as state secrets, the country is widely believed to put to death thousands of people every year. Even at conservative estimates, the annual toll of Chinese executions is higher than the rest of the world’s governments combined, Amnesty International reported this year.

The heavy use of capital punishment has drawn heated criticism from an international community leery of the human rights practices of an ascending China. Domestically, too, the government has been faced with an ongoing public debate over the death penalty, which has long been advocated by officials here as an effective deterrent against crime and chaos.

Human rights workers here and abroad greeted this week’s discussion of limiting executions with delicate and guarded optimism – neither willing to ignore the symbolic importance of China scaling down its execution rate nor eager to overstate the number of lives likely to be saved.

But even if China goes through with the push to limit executions, the death penalty would remain on the books as a punishment for 55 crimes. Many of those are nonviolent offenses such as accepting bribes, making fake medicine, damaging public property and organizing prostitution.