Courts correcting their wrongs to let people feel justice in every case

Zhou Qiang, president of the Supreme People's Court, China's top court, delivers a work report to the fourth session of the 12th National People's Congress (NPC) and the 12th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) on Sunday. [Photo by Xu Jingxing/chinadaily.com.cn]

In the annual work report of the Supreme People's Court to the National People's Congress on Sunday, Chief Justice Zhou Qiang said national courts corrected 1,357 wrongful convictions in criminal cases last year. For three successive years he has mentioned "correcting wrongful convictions", which Beijing Youth Daily called positive progress on Monday:

We mortals commit wrongs. The right attitude when finding we have done something wrong is to admit it and correct it. The Supreme People's Court has done this in its annual work report by listing the wrongs of the courts, which shows not only their confidence in correcting the mistakes, but also their determination to defend justice.

A thorough reading of the SPC's past reports shows the efforts it has made to prevent these wrongs from happening again. For example, in their 2014 report, they said they would strengthen the double-checking of evidence and allow lawyers to play a bigger role in criminal defense cases. In the 2015 report, they promised to better uphold the principle of assumption of innocence.

These statements are sincere and hit the nail on the head.

This year the SPC has once again emphasized the role of transparency and promised to establish a mechanism for correcting wrong judgments. That's the right thing to do because more important than correcting past wrongs is preventing more wrongs in the future.

We hope the SPC can accelerate the implementation of the measures it mentioned, so that wrongful convictions will be prevented instead of being corrected. Of course, it is better late than never, but we still expect justice to arrive on time.

Throwing innocent people into prison inflicts irreparable damage to both them and their families, and undermines people's trust in the rule of law.

China is establishing the rule of law and the top leadership has promised to let people feel justice in every case. There is much work for the SPC still to do.