A proposed law to legitimise China’s anti-corruption purge will roll back two decades of legal reforms designed to give defendants some protection against unfair prosecution, legal scholars have warned.
The use of the extrajudicial shuanggui, or detention by Communist party investigators, to enforce Xi Jinping’s five-year anti-corruption purge was so unpopular among the party rank-and-file that China’s president vowed to replace the practice with another, legalised, detention system.
Constitutional changes proposed this month would create a National Supervision Commission that would widen the scope of the party’s authority over all civil servants, whether party members or not, without including any of the protections encoded in Chinese civil law. As such, a civil servant suspected of taking a bribe would be entitled to fewer legal protections than an accused murderer.