The Death Penalty in China – the road to reform

No. 8 in the Law Faculty Series (2014)

www.law.ox.ac.uk

Research by leading Oxford academics, Professor Roger Hood and Professor Carolyn Hoyle, hasinfluenced worldwide reform of the death penalty. Nowhere is this more evident than in Chinawhere the number of executions has fallen dramatically over the last decade.

Roger Hood, formerly Professor of Criminologyand Carolyn Hoyle, Professor of Criminology atOxford University have undertaken a sustainedcross-national study of factors that influencechanges in the scope and application of capitalpunishment. The work began with RogerHood’s report for the United Nations on theprogress made towards the world-wideelimination of capital punishment, published byOUP as The Death Penalty – A worldwideperspective in 1988. Hood and Hoyle joinedforces as co-authors of a revised and enlargedfourth edition (2008) and a fifth edition (2014),such has been the remarkable and continuingincrease in the countries that have abandonedor reduced their use of capital punishment.

This book (which has been translated intoChinese, Persian and Japanese) and their otherresearch reports and articles have become anessential resource for criminal justiceprofessionals, NGOs, and policy makersattempting to reform the use of capitalpunishment in many countries such as Trinidad,Malaysia, India, Pakistan, Taiwan and Japan.Over the past decade their direct engagementwith policy makers and scholars in China, theirinvolvement in judicial education, and asconsultants to EU-funded research projects, hasmade a distinctive contribution acknowledgedby those who are pressing for reform andelimination of the death penalty.

‘Hood and Hoyle are doing vital work which isonly going to get more vital with thepoliticisation of the death penalty in Asia’Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve

China has long had the reputation as theworld’s chief executioner but in the last decadehas become much more receptive tointernational trends and human rightsobligations. Hood and Hoyle’s book is the onlyinternational academic work on the deathpenalty that is widely disseminated anddiscussed among Chinese academics, policymakers and practitioners in both closed andopen fora.

In 2007 the Supreme People’s Court of Chinaassumed the power to review every deathsentence handed down by a lower court. Whilstthe execution rate is still regrettably a closelyguarded secret, it is widely rumoured that thenumber of executions has at least halved sincethis reform. Then, in February 2011, Chinaabolished the death penalty for 13 non-violentcrimes, reducing the number of crimespunishable by death from 68 to 55, and bannedcapital punishment for offenders over the ageof 75. As Professor Hoyle explains ‘Important inthemselves, these reforms are emblematic ofChina’s emerging commitment to limit thescope and practice of capital punishment instages, with, as it stated to the UN HumanRights Council in 2007, the final aim ofabolition.’

‘Hood and Hoyle’s research has had asignificant impact on the debate on the deathpenalty in East Asia and their work is one of thecontributing factors to changing policy.’Baroness Stern, International Centre for Prison Studies.