China executes Briton despite UK, family pleas

Monday, Dec. 28, 2009
By NG HAN GUAN
Associated Press Writer

URUMQI, China — China brushed aside international appeals Tuesday and executed by lethal injection a British drug smuggler who relatives say was mentally unstable and unwittingly lured into crime.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was "appalled" at the execution of 53-year old Akmal Shaikh - China's first of a European citizen in nearly 60 years. His government summoned the Chinese ambassador in London to express its anger.

China defended its handling of the case, saying there had not been documentary proof Shaikh was mentally ill. Beijing also criticized Brown's comments, but said it hoped the case would not harm bilateral relations. The Foreign Ministry called on London not to create any "obstacles" to better ties.

Shaikh's daughter Leilla Horsnell was quoted by the BBC and other British media outlets as saying she was "shocked and disappointed that the execution went ahead with no regards to my dad's mental health problems, and I struggle to understand how this is justice."

The execution is the latest sign of how China's communist government, with its rising global economic and political clout, is increasingly willing to defy Western complaints over its justice system and human rights record.

Last week, a court sentenced the co-author of a political reform manifesto to 11 years in prison in what rights groups called a direct rebuff to international pressure. Diplomats from more than a dozen countries were shut out of Liu Xiaobo's trial on subversion charges. The United States called for his immediate release.

Earlier in the month, China urged Cambodia to interrupt a U.N. refugee screening process and subsequently Phnom Penh repatriated 20 ethnic Uighur asylum seekers accused of involvement in ethnic unrest in western China.

Shaikh, a Briton of Pakistani descent, was arrested in 2007 for carrying a suitcase with almost 9 pounds (4 kilograms) of heroin into China on a flight from Tajikistan. He told Chinese officials he didn't know about the drugs and that the suitcase wasn't his, according to Reprieve, a London-based prisoner advocacy group that is helping with his case.

He was convicted in 2008 after a half-hour trial.

He first learned he was about to be executed Monday from his visiting cousins, who made a last-minute plea for his life. They say he is mentally unstable and was lured to China from a life on the street in Poland by men playing on his dreams to record a pop song for world peace.

The press office of the Xinjiang region where Shaikh had been held confirmed the execution in a statement handed to journalists.

In his statement issued by the Foreign Office, Brown said he condemned the execution "in the strongest terms, and am appalled and disappointed that our persistent requests for clemency have not been granted."

"I am particularly concerned that no mental health assessment was undertaken," Brown said.

The Foreign Office said Foreign Minister Ivan Lewis on Tuesday had reiterated to China's ambassador, Fu Ying, statements by Brown and Foreign Secretary David Miliband condemning Shaikh's execution.

Brown had spoken personally to China's prime minister about the case. Miliband had earlier condemned the execution and said there were unanswered questions about the trial - including over whether there was adequate interpretation during the trial.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu responded that drug smuggling was a serious crime.

"We express our strong dissatisfaction and opposition to the British accusation," Jiang told a regularly scheduled news conference in Beijing.

The official Xinhua News Agency quoted China's Supreme Court as saying Tuesday that although officials from the British Embassy and a British aid organization called for a mental health examination for Shaikh, "the documents they provided could not prove he had a mental disorder nor did members of his family have a history of mental disease."

"There is no reason to cast doubt on Akmal Shaikh's mental status," the Supreme Court was quoted as saying.

Xinhua said Shaikh was put to death by lethal injection. China, which executes more people than any other country, is increasingly doing so by lethal injection, although some death sentences are still carried out by a shot in the head.

The Beijing-based lawyer for Shaikh's death sentence review, Zhang Qingsong, said Tuesday he never got to meet with Shaikh despite asking the judge and the detention center for access. He said China's highest court never evaluated Shaikh's mental status.

According to Reprieve, the last European executed in China was Antonio Riva, an Italian pilot who was shot by a firing squad in 1951 after being convicted of involvement in what China said was a plot to assassinate Mao Zedong and other high-ranking communist officials.

"The death of Akmal Shaikh is a sad indictment of today's world, and particularly of China's legal system. ... We at Reprieve are sickened by what we have seen during our work on this case," said Sally Rowen, legal director of Reprieve's death penalty team.

Reprieve issued a statement from Shaikh's family members saying they expressed "their grief at the Chinese decision to refuse mercy."

The statement thanked supporters, including those who attended a vigil for Shaikh outside the Chinese Embassy in London on Monday night, along with members of a Facebook group that drew 5,000 members in just a few days.

The statement asked the media and public to respect the family's privacy as they "come to terms with what has happened to someone they loved."

Gareth Saunders, a British teacher who knew Shaikh in Warsaw, said his friend was cheerful but obviously very mentally ill. He said the last time they met in an underpass, Shaikh said he was traveling to Central Asia but would return in two weeks.

"I tried to contact after two weeks, no reply. that was the last time I tried to contact him," Saunders told The Associated Press.

Associated Press reporters Alexa Olesen and Cara Anna in Beijing contributed to this story.

China shows caution on executions

A SHOT TO THE HEAD: Police officers in Guanxi province drill on the most common execution method in China, where more people are believed put to death each year than in the rest of the world. (Photo: Associated Press)

Facing pressure before the Olympics, Beijing's policy is to 'kill fewer, kill carefully.' Activists urge more legal reforms.

January 6, 2008
By John M. Glionna
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer (California, USA)

BEIJING — In 10 years on China's highest court, Xuan Dong had a hand in the executions of 1,000 people -- most carried out by a bullet to the back of the head, often within weeks of the verdict.

On his worst days, he considered himself a Communist Party hanging judge.

Sitting on the Supreme People's Court, he represented the last hope of the condemned. Secretly, he loathed rubber-stamping death sentences against people who he thought rarely deserved such a fate, often accepting confessions he knew were gained by torture. He watched silently as lawyers were beaten and dragged from court if they challenged the party's will.

In 2000, Xuan walked away from the bench to battle for human rights. Now, as China re-evaluates its hard-line policies on capital punishment, the 59-year-old defense lawyer has called for public trials, more media exposure and protections for lawyers, and less party interference with the judiciary.

"The party should not give instructions" to judges, he said. "There have been changes bit by bit, but they are too slow."

Recently, Chinese rights advocates such as Xuan have seen progress within a legal system that each year is estimated to execute more people than all other countries combined. Legislation enacted in 2006 requires the high court to review all death sentences, a step that had been dropped two decades ago.

Facing pressure before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China reportedly has scaled back the pace of executions. Although the government considers the number a state secret, China executed 1,051 people in 2006, accounting for two-thirds of the 1,591 put to death worldwide that year, according to statistics from Amnesty International, often based on media reports.

That represented a 40% drop from China's recorded total of 1,770 the previous year. Yet because of state secrecy, some activists believe that the number of executions could be as high as 10,000 to 15,000 a year.

The high court reviewed only a small portion of capital cases in recent years. Lower courts had operated virtually without oversight since Deng Xiaoping gave them the power to impose capital punishment amid a crime wave in the 1980s. Acquittals are rare and appeals are made in the same court, heard by poorly trained provincial judges little inclined to contradict themselves, according to studies by criminal justice experts.

Flawed system

The studies, relying on interviews with lawyers and defendants, paint a bleak picture: There are no juries, police have unchecked powers and forensics are rarely used in reaching verdicts that vary wildly depending on region, party influence and a defendant's connections.

Sixty-eight offenses, including such nonviolent crimes as tax evasion and pornography distribution, carry the death penalty. Officials are considering reducing the number of crimes punishable by execution, but say corruption, bribery and national security violations might still lead to death sentences.

The reforms, advocated by a growing lobby of Chinese lawyers and scholars, are part of a policy that officials call "kill fewer, kill carefully." It calls for improved trial and review processes, and requires that all death penalty appeals be heard in open court.

Experts are divided over how much substance the reforms carry.

"For China, it's an exciting breakthrough," said Jerome A. Cohen, a New York University law professor and adjunct senior fellow for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"Death penalty reforms will lead the way for improved procedures for other major criminal cases."

Others say the Chinese legal system still lacks transparency.

"So you have the return of an important piece of review," said Sharon Hom, director of the New York-based group Human Rights in China. "But you're reviewing a system that is still politicized, that still does not welcome independent judges and where lawyers raising questions about abuse or torture are being harassed and beaten up."

Human Rights in China released a report in 2006 documenting the abuse of defense lawyers. From 1997 to 2002, more than 500 were jailed.

In 2006, a judge "beat and choked" a lawyer for filing a case. "I am the court, the court is me, If I say the case will not be filed, the case will not be filed," the report quoted the judge as saying.

A year before, a lawyer visiting a client was "beaten by five unidentified men and then taken into police custody," the report said. The lawyer was freed only when his client's trial was over.

Li Fangping, 33, a Beijing defense lawyer, got involved in death cases after seeing a man sentenced to death for stealing a cellphone. Each time he tried to defend himself, the judge silenced him. Li vowed to help change the system.

He has suffered some hearing loss because of beatings by police officers during subsequent cases. "In a big case, if you try to be aggressive in defending your client, that can often lead to trouble for you," he said.

Li Heping, 37, another Beijing defense lawyer, said police tortured suspects to get confessions in several of his death penalty cases. They also denied him access to his clients.

"I'm seen as an enemy of the police," he said. "When you come to court you feel surrounded by hunters. And you are their prey."

Insider's view

Xuan, the former judge, said he once saw officials tape a lawyer's mouth shut. He said police tortured a defendant to make him change his story, then charged his lawyer with fabricating evidence.

Worse, he said, was the pressure exerted by party officials. Xuan once sentenced a police chief to death for setting a bomb intended to kill a party official. The bomb missed its target, but a vengeful party hierarchy sought to make an example of the would-be killer.

In some cases, the government has been embarrassed when the death penalty was handed down and carried out in error. One man was executed after being convicted of killing his wife, but she later turned up alive. Officials acknowledge that their "kill-fewer" campaign was prompted in part by such errors.

Yet China continues to use capital punishment as a political tool. In July, the head of the nation's drug and food safety agency was executed for accepting bribes to allow approval of fake medicines that led to 10 deaths.

Along with more judicious use of the death penalty, activists are pressing for more candor.

"The number of executions remains a state secret -- they could shoot someone for revealing the number," said Franklin Zimring, a UC Berkeley law professor and co-author of a book on the death penalty in Asia to be published this year. "That puts a damper on empirical research."

Cohen, the New York professor, also cites China's secretiveness: "It's like the old joke about Soviet grain yields -- they'd say it was 50% over last year, but they never said what last year was."

In the 1950s, China reportedly executed 1 million people a year, when the government considered "human life as a renewable resource," Zimring said.

Experts hope China's judicial reforms will provide lawyers with strategies such as evidence gathering and courtroom arguments -- rights they now lack, according to a study by the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law, based in Freiburg, Germany.

In many lower court death cases, clients get lawyers only after they confess, and meetings are strictly monitored. Confessions obtained through torture are routinely admitted as evidence, the report says.

David Johnson, a University of Hawaii sociology professor and Zimring's co-author, said China's high court already had reversed several death sentences. Its reviews should extend the time between sentencing and execution, said Johnson, who in 2006 taught China's first course on capital punishment to Peking University Law School students. Johnson said many young lawyers are convinced that China's justice system needs to change. Many top officials agree.

"There's a new dialogue," said Roger Hood, a United Nations consultant and retired professor at the Oxford University Center for Criminology. "My Chinese colleagues used to be defensive. Now they seek to understand how other countries have abolished the death penalty."

For his part, former judge Xuan hopes that one day party officials will not require judges to blindly follow party doctrine.

"I saw so many people die, I no longer had any emotion."

john.glionna@latimes.com
Julie Zhang of The Times' Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.