China's highest court calls for end to torture of accused criminals

China’s Supreme People’s Court on Thursday called for an end to torture as a method of extracting confessions, a widespread practice in China’s notoriously abusive legal system, ordering lower courts to exclude evidence obtained through torture from consideration.

The country’s top court issued the recommendation as Beijing introduces a set of reforms aimed at curbing harsh punishments for criminals, including abolishing the widely criticized "re-education through labor" system and limiting the application of the death penalty.

"Interrogation by torture in extracting a confession, as well as the use of freezing, hunger, drying, scorching, fatigue and other illegal methods to obtain a confession from the accused must be eliminated," the court said on its verified account on Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging platform.

Beijing has taken significant steps in recent months to clean up the image of its justice system, which activists say is plagued by abusive practices aimed at producing confessions and archaic punishments like the forced labor camps where many convicted criminals are sent for extended periods of time.

The Supreme People’s Court also presented more stringent guidelines for the death penalty, saying that only experienced judges should handle capital cases and adequate evidence must be furnished for conviction.

China is believed to execute more people than all other countries combined, according to Amnesty International, which estimates the annual number of executions in China to count in the thousands.

But human rights activists say China’s track record of failing to respect judicial independence is cause to temper optimism about the high court’s recommendations.

Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch called the announcement a “welcome next step” in an article posted to the rights group’s website, but added that observers should “not be naive about the improvements one paper document can bring to the system.”

“The Supreme People’s Court’s announcement should not pass as a real reform yet,” Bequelin said. “For one, it only speaks to the courts, while it’s the police, a much more powerful institution than China’s weak courts, that does the torturing.”

China’s courts ultimately answer to the ruling Communist Party, so many question whether the Supreme People’s Court’s recommendation will be implemented. Torture is reportedly rampant in the party’s own internal judicial system.

In September, four party officials were sentenced to 14 years in prison for torturing another official to death. The man reportedly drowned while his head was repeatedly dunked in a bucket of ice water.

Defendants in Chinese courts are all but doomed to conviction. According to the U.S. State Department's latest human rights report on the country, Chinese courts find 99.9 percent of defendants guilty.

But a handful of wrongful convictions were overturned earlier this year, including that of Chen Keyun, who served 12 years in prison after he confessed, following severe beatings, to a bombing that killed a man.

Al Jazeera with wire services