BEIJING, Dec. 28 (Xinhua) -- China
approved two extradition treaties with Afghanistan and Iran on Sunday,
making the number of such treaties ratified by China 36.
Ratified by the National People's
Congress (NPC) Standing Committee,
the two treaties further strengthen China's international judicial
cooperation, benefiting the global fight against crime.
In 1994, the committee ratified an
extradition treaty between China and Thailand, the first of its kind, which
took effect on March 7, 1999.
In 2002, Chen Manxiong and his wife Chen
Qiuyuan, who allegedly misappropriated hundreds of millions of yuan in south
China's Guangdong Province and fled to Thailand, were extradited from
Thailand to China.
Naw Kham, head of an armed
drug gang who masterminded the murder of 13 Chinese sailors on the Mekong
River in 2011, was extradited to China from Laos for investigation and court
trial in May 2012.
Huang Feng, professor of Beijing Normal
University's Criminal Law Research Institute, said extradition could be
applied to all kinds of crimes, as long as they are defined as a crime by
both countries' laws and meet provisions in the treaty.
For China, the treaties have been often
applied to get back suspects of economic crimes, fleeing corrupt officials or
terrorists, while other countries may focus on other aspects, for example,
violent crime offenders or drug dealers, he said.
A lack of treaties with certain
countries to some extent hampered China's attempts to secure the extradition
of many fugitives in its fierce anti-graft campaign.
The case of Yang Xiuzhu, former vice
mayor of Wenzhou in east China's Zhejiang Province, is a typical example.
When investigators started looking into her possible involvement in graft in
2003, she fled China with her family to the United States via Singapore
and then to the Netherlands.
Investigators later uncovered evidence
showing Yang had accepted bribes amounting to 253 million yuan (41 million
U.S. dollars). Through Interpol, China filed a Red Notice for her in 2006 and
negotiations had begun but had yet to bear fruit.
This lack of cross-border coordination
enables officials to hide in plain sight and has clearly thwarted domestic
efforts to root out corruption.
On April 29, 2006, the NPC Standing
Committee ratified an extradition treaty with Spain, the first such
treaty China has signed with a developed Western country.
Xu Hong, who headed the Chinese
delegation in China-Spain extradition talks, said the treaty would help China
weave a global extradition net to bring back corrupt officials who have fled
abroad, largely seeking asylum in developed countries in Europe and North
America.
In the treaty, China unprecedentedly
agreed that it will not execute repatriated criminals.
The treaty stirred up debate among
Chinese legal experts and lawmakers at that time, with some fearing that it
might weaken China's anti-graft efforts by exempting runaway crime suspects
from death penalty.
Other experts argued that China's use of
death penalty, especially on severe economic crimes, makes it hard for the
country to cooperate on extradition with countries in the EU and North
America who uphold the policy that no person who might be subject to the
death penalty would be extradited.
Huang said that by accepting the clause
of not executing repatriated criminals, China cleared up the biggest obstacle
to conclude extradition treaties with certain countries.
Following the treaty with Spain, China
signed extradition treaties with Australia, France, Portugal and Italy.
In Australia, France and Italy, the
treaties have yet to be ratified.
Huang Feng is optimistic with the future
development. He said developed Western countries also need China's
cooperation in the international hunt for fugitives.
"The judicial and legal cooperation
between China and Western countries will be further strengthened," he
said.
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Sunday, December 28, 2014
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