Current Projects
The U.S.-Asia Law Institute's projects are essential to achieving its dual goals of assistance and understanding. By closely collaborating with key partners in Asia, our projects are able to respond to Asia's ever-changing legal landscape and offer training, research and a comparative perspective on recent legal reforms. By working on the ground in Asia, we gain a firsthand understanding of the forces and pressures shaping legal reform, allowing us to use this information to accurately inform our audience back home as to the realities abroad.
Below are the Institute's current projects.
- Procedural Safeguards for Death Penalty Appeals in China
- Empirical Study of Simplified Procedures in Chinese Criminal Trials
- Taiwan's Contribution to China's Criminal Justice
- China's Use of Criminal Sanctions to Enhance Trademark Protection
Procedural Safeguards for Death Penalty Appeals in China
For the past three years, the Institute has worked closely with Chinese judges, lawyers, prosecutors, legislators and academics to improve procedural safeguards in death penalty appeals. During this time, China has made significant progress in reforming review of death penalty trial decisions, with the Supreme People's Court -China's highest court- reasserting its final review power over all capital appeals. Because of these changes, China is reporting a new ten-year low in the number of death sentences for 2007. To assist this effort, the Institute hosts training sessions and mock-trials for criminal defense lawyers, judges, and prosecutors throughout China, focusing on some of the most pertinent issues in capital cases.
Through this project, we have also convened a series of forums, inviting both Chinese and American experts in capital litigation to discuss potential reforms to China's death penalty adjudication procedures. To provide a further comparative perspective, in May 2007, we invited a delegation of Chinese judges, lawyers, prosecutors and academics on a two-week study tour of capital trials and procedures in the United States. Through our work with our Chinese partners and our involvement in the current death penalty reform effort in China, we have gained an in-depth understanding of the forces propelling China's reform efforts and the problems that need to be resolved.
Empirical Study of Simplified Procedures in Chinese Criminal Trials
In China, over 700,000 criminal cases are brought each year, stretching the limited resources of an already overburdened system to its maximum. In 2002, to deal with this huge caseload, courts across China began experimenting with procedures intended to conserve judicial resources in criminal cases. One change adopted by local courts, and eventually endorsed by the Supreme People's Court, the Supreme People's Procuracy and the Ministry of Justice, was the use of simplified procedures in cases where the defendant pled guilty, regardless of the length of the sentence involved. Our project, the first to empirically investigate China's use of simplified procedures in uncontested criminal cases, seeks to determine if these procedures do in fact conserve judicial resources and, if so, at what costs to other values, such as accuracy, equity and justice. With our Chinese partners, we have had unprecedented access to Chinese courts, judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys, allowing us to analyze the use of simplified procedures in different parts of the country. We have already used our research to convene a workshop in China to disseminate information about these new procedures to judges, prosecutors and defense counsel and we intend to further use our research to provide recommendations for reform.
Taiwan's Contribution to China's Criminal Justice
With its shared history and culture, Taiwan's experience can be a useful guide to mainland China's current efforts at legal reform. The U.S.-Asia Law Institute is conducting a comparative study of the Mainland and Taiwan justice systems that will make available Taiwan's experience for current criminal procedure reform in China. As part of this greater project, we are working with partners at National Taiwan University to study "public security tribunals" and their relevance to the future of the Mainland's "re-education through labor." The tribunals are dedicated to trying cases of accused "liumang," which is varyingly translated as hoodlum, hooligan, and gangster. In 2006, we held a conference in Taiwan that brought together an impressive array of judges, police officials, defense lawyers, prosecutors, and academics to discuss the future of the governing legislation, the Act for Eliminating Liumang. This issue has now been once again brought to the fore with a February 2008 ruling by Taiwan's Council of Grand Justices that declared several provisions of the Act unconstitutional.
China's Use of Criminal Sanctions to Enhance Trademark Protection
Violations of intellectual property rights in China are commonplace and have become a major issue in China's relations with other countries. As a result, China has begun to experiment with the use of criminal sanctions to deter intellectual property violations. This project, focusing on trademark violations, is an initial effort to learn the extent to which criminal sanctions are actually invoked to enforce China's protection of trademarks and to understand how the Chinese criminal process works in this context. Through analyzing the relevant legislation and interviewing judges, prosecutors, government officials, attorneys and disputing parties in selected cities, as well as observing criminal trademark trials, we are gaining an understanding of the usefulness and effectiveness of the criminal process to guarantee intellectual property rights. We will use our research to offer proposals to improve relevant legislation, enforcement techniques and adjudication procedures in criminal trademark cases in China.