China extends intl judicial cooperation with more extradition treaties ratified

China approved two extradition treaties with Afghanistan and Iran on Sunday, making the number of such treaties ratified by China 36.

Ratified by the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, the two treaties further strengthen China's international judicial cooperation, benefiting the global fight against crime.

In 1994, the committee ratified an extradition treaty between China and Thailand, the first of its kind, which took effect on March 7, 1999.

In 2002, Chen Manxiong and his wife Chen Qiuyuan, who allegedly misappropriated hundreds of millions of yuan in south China's Guangdong Province and fled to Thailand, were extradited from Thailand to China.

Naw Kham, head of an armed drug gang who masterminded the murder of 13 Chinese sailors on the Mekong River in 2011, was extradited to China from Laos for investigation and court trial in May 2012.

Huang Feng, professor of Beijing Normal University's Criminal Law Research Institute, said extradition could be applied to all kinds of crimes, as long as they are defined as a crime by both countries' laws and meet provisions in the treaty.

For China, the treaties have been often applied to get back suspects of economic crimes, fleeing corrupt officials or terrorists, while other countries may focus on other aspects, for example, violent crime offenders or drug dealers, he said.

In August 2010, China extradited a suspected women trafficker back to Russia.

A lack of treaties with certain countries to some extent hampered China's attempts to secure the extradition of many fugitives in its fierce anti-graft campaign.

The case of Yang Xiuzhu, former vice mayor of Wenzhou in east China's Zhejiang Province, is a typical example. When investigators started looking into her possible involvement in graft in 2003, she fled China with her family to the United States via Singapore and then to the Netherlands.

Investigators later uncovered evidence showing Yang had accepted bribes amounting to 253 million yuan (41 million U.S. dollars). Through Interpol, China filed a Red Notice for her in 2006 and negotiations had begun but had yet to bear fruit.

This lack of cross-border coordination enables officials to hide in plain sight and has clearly thwarted domestic efforts to root out corruption.

On April 29, 2006, the NPC Standing Committee ratified an extradition treaty with Spain, the first such treaty China has signed with a developed Western country.

Xu Hong, who headed the Chinese delegation in China-Spain extradition talks, said the treaty would help China weave a global extradition net to bring back corrupt officials who have fled abroad, largely seeking asylum in developed countries in Europe and North America.

In the treaty, China unprecedentedly agreed that it will not execute repatriated criminals.

The treaty stirred up debate among Chinese legal experts and lawmakers at that time, with some fearing that it might weaken China's anti-graft efforts by exempting runaway crime suspects from death penalty.

Other experts argued that China's use of death penalty, especially on severe economic crimes, makes it hard for the country to cooperate on extradition with countries in the EU and North America who uphold the policy that no person who might be subject to the death penalty would be extradited.

Huang said that by accepting the clause of not executing repatriated criminals, China cleared up the biggest obstacle to conclude extradition treaties with certain countries.

Following the treaty with Spain, China signed extradition treaties with Australia, France, Portugal and Italy.

In Australia, France and Italy, the treaties have yet to be ratified.

Huang Feng is optimistic with the future development. He said developed Western countries also need China's cooperation in the international hunt for fugitives.

"The judicial and legal cooperation between China and Western countries will be further strengthened," he said.