Tiger Chairs and Cell Bosses - Police Torture of Criminal Suspects in China

In 2012, the National People’s Congress revised the country’s Criminal Procedure Law to require law enforcement officials to improve access to legal counsel for suspects and to exclude suspects’ confessions and written statements obtained through torture. The Ministry of Public Security, the agency in charge of the police, claims that the use of coerced confessions decreased 87 percent in 2012, that cell bosses who abuse fellow suspects are “things of the past,” and that deaths in custody reached a “historic low” in 2013. Some Chinese legal scholars contend that, due to these efforts, torture is “gradually being curbed” at least for ordinary, non-political criminal defendants. This report— based on Human Rights Watch analysis of hundreds of newly published court verdicts from across the country and interviews with 48 recent detainees, family members, lawyers, and former officials—shows that the measures adopted between 2009 and 2013 have not gone far enough.