China's Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC) began debating on a draft amendment to the criminal law on executions for reducing the number of crimes attracting death penalty, state-run news agency, Xinhua, reported Monday.
"China currently stipulates that 68 crimes are punishable by the death penalty. The draft amendment eliminates capital punishment for 13 economy-related non-violent offenses, a drop of 19.1 percent," it said.
It added that the amendment to Criminal Law defined "organization in the nature of a criminal syndicate", and listed tougher punishments for crimes by such organizations.
The development came more than a year after Zhang Jun, Vice-President of the SPC, indicated (in July 2009) that China planned to reduce the number of people it was executing each year by imposing more suspended death sentences and limiting capital punishment to those who had committed extremely serious crimes leading to grave social consequences.
Chinese authorities claim that the executions came down drastically after the Chinese government authorized the SPC in September 2007 to review death sentences handed down by lower courts. London-based Amnesty International, however, estimated that Chinese courts sentenced to 7,000 persons to death and had 1,718 executed in 2008.
China executes more of its citizens than any other country every year. Under its current laws, 68 offenses attract death sentence, including many non-violent and economic crimes, including tax fraud and embezzlement.
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