China’s new anti-graft super-ministry adds to concerns about rights

BEIJING: A new “super-ministry” set to deepen Chinese President Xi Jinping’s war on graft and extend it to all state employees is likely to undermine years of work by Chinese legal reformers to protect the rights of suspects during investigations, according to some Chinese academics.

Probes undertaken as part of Xi’s anti-corruption campaign have used the party’s rules for internal investigations and are therefore outside the boundaries of China’s criminal justice system. That means reforms introduced in 2012 that provided some protection to suspects don’t apply in those cases, raising the possibility of forced confessions and miscarriages of justice, some legal scholars say. Xi has vowed that his fight against deep-seated corruption in the ruling Communist Party should intensify, saying that China needs strong mechanisms to form a “cage” to prevent officials of all levels from breaking rules.

At an upcoming annual meeting in March, China’s rubber-stamp parliament is expected to establish a new government branch, the National Supervision Commission, potentially on par with China’s cabinet and military commission, to oversee the fight against corruption. The changes are expected to further empower the already feared party watchdog, the Central Commission of Discipline Commission (CCDI), political analysts say.

In some localities, the number of individuals that could be targeted with an investigation will increase many fold after the provincial-level branches of the commission are established, according to state media reports.