Plenum pledge won't make scrapping China's labour camps any easier

Last week's decisions of the Communist Party's Central Committee promise significant changes to many aspects of China's legal system. None may be more important and immediate than its announcement that the party is terminating "re-education through labour", the notorious administrative punishment to which the police alone can sentence anyone for as much as three years of detention in a labour camp, with a possible one-year extension. Police don't need the approval of any court or even the agreement of the prosecutor's office.

Is re-education through labour, which has been a mainstay of China's dictatorial power since 1957 and often attacked by law reformers, really to be abolished in substance as well as name?

Just two months ago, we published a book titled Challenge To China: How Taiwan Abolished Its Version Of Re-education Through Labor. It tells the story of how, in 2009, Taipei finally ended its equivalent of re-education through labour, an abiding hallmark of the Leninist-style party-state of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Party. This milestone was a triumph for the island's democracy and rule of law.

It took Taiwan over two decades to eliminate what it euphemistically called its "technical training institutes" for re-educating liumang, a term that can be loosely translated as "hooligans" but that had long been used to detain political offenders as well as petty hoods. Spurred by an increasingly well-informed and activist civil society and independent legal profession, Taiwan's executive, legislative and judicial branches collaborated to restrain police power by improving not only the formal criminal justice system but also the parallel system of police-dominated administrative punishment that undermined the criminal justice system.

Three interpretations by Taiwan's formerly docile constitutional court, invalidating various aspects of the administrative punishment system, played a critical role in its demise. Mainland China, however, has no constitutional court and denies its regular courts the power to apply its constitution. Despite China's constitutional guarantee that the state respects human rights, courts cannot vindicate human rights abuses based on this clear statement.

Moreover, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, which holds exclusive power to interpret the constitution, refuses to exercise it. Nevertheless, the just-released party plenum decisions, without offering details, emphasise the necessity of strengthening supervision of the constitution's enforcement and flatly declares that re-education through labour will be annulled.

So how is this likely to be accomplished? Some areas in China stopped invoking re-education through labour soon after the new head of the party's central political-legal commission, former minister for public security Meng Jianzhu , said in January that it would cease by the end of the year.