The president of the People’s Supreme Court (CSP) of China, Zhou Qiang, proposed this Tuesday, during the rendering of accounts of that body before the National People’s Assembly (ANP, the Chinese Legislative), the harsher sentences to punish crimes against women and children. Along these lines, he considered that in the In more serious cases, the death penalty should be applied.
According to the official Global Times newspaper, the president of China’s highest judicial body stated, at the most important annual political meeting in the Asian country, that “for crimes that defy the most essential of the law and ethics, such as those that damage women, children and the elderly, the death penalty must be approved in line with the law“.
Zhou promised for this year “serious punishments” for crimes of sexual abuse and the trafficking and sale of women and children. In his 2021 report to lawmakers, the official noted that the Supreme Court issued 3,356 restraining orders to protect victims of abuse.
During his exposition, Zhou promised “severe punishments” for crimes of sexual abuse. Photo Liu Weibing/Xinhua
For his part, the head of the Supreme People’s Prosecutor’s Office, Zhan Jung, also assured that the prosecution of human trafficking will remain strict. In parallel, he committed himself to the cases that have been unsolved for the longest time and stressed that suspects involved in kidnappings and trafficking will be persecuted “harshly”.
Human trafficking is a persistent problem in China, exacerbated by the already repealed one-child policy and by the imbalance between the sexes, which has caused, according to the World Bank, that there were 42 million more men than women in 2017.
Single men sometimes resort to buying women from remote parts of China or neighboring countries like Vietnam.
In recent years, technologies such as DNA analysis or facial recognition have contributed to solving cases of sale of children and women.
A case that caused a stir
The recent case of a woman who was sold and lived for years in chains It has outraged Chinese society, which asks its leaders for harsher punishments and greater efforts in the fight against trafficking. It was this growing discontent that caused the issue to be addressed these days in the ANP.
For that fact, discovered in January of this year, three subjects were arrested, one of whom was the victim’s husband, with whom he has eight children. They also specified that 17 local officials were sanctioned.
The images of this mother in great psychological suffering, chained by the neck in a barn in the province of Jiangsu, in the east of the country, circulated widely on social networks. The woman, who suffers from schizophrenia, was hospitalized.
In a statement, provincial authorities announced that the husband, named Dong, had been formally detained along with two other people accused of human trafficking.
The 55-year-old woman was sold several times, once in 1998, for 5,000 yuan ($793 at current prices) after being kidnapped from her village in Yunnan, some 2,000 km from where she was discovered.
Authorities initially denied that the case was related to human trafficking. Eight officials were removed from their posts and another nine were sanctioned to varying degrees, according to the provincial administration.
With information from agencies
DB
