Prosecution Office for Criminal Appeals Set up in ChinaA new prosecution office handling criminal appeals has been established in the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) to help maintain justice for people wronged by judicial bodies.The problem is still serious that people have little means to lodge complaints against judiciaries, Han Zhubin, procurator-general of the SPP, said here today at a national conference. He urged the new office to serve justice to people whose cases has been misjudged or never brought to court for criminal prosecution. "It is against the law to ignore criminal appeals, or not to correct misjudged cases," he warned. Statistics show that criminal appeals handled by procuratorates has been rising steadily every year in the past decade, which reached to 8,699 in 1999, 77.7 percent up from 1990. Of the appeals handled in the past 10 years, 12,024 have been redressed. However, according to He Yehui, head of the new office, a considerable amount of criminal appeals have never been assessed by prosecutors, and the situation is worse at grassroots levels who are reluctant to handle appeals from the area under their own jurisdiction. "As a result, many people have been lodging complaints to higher level procuratorates and make them to busy to handle all cases," he said. Han said today that all criminal appeals must be re-examined through legal procedures, and a timetable for the re-examination should be formulated by all procuratorates. |
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