China’s ‘two sessions’ 2023: legal protections for women still a work in progress, experts say

Name: Chinese women turn to self-defence classes after brutal attack on female diners in Tangshan
Uploaded: 2023-03-09T09:00:10.000Z
Duration: 3 min 50 s
Description: Chinese women turn to self-defence classes after brutal attack on female diners in Tangshan

Legal work reports delivered to NPC ‘completely silent’ about civil rights, analyst says

Authorities should provide more transparency and a credible enforcement database, women’s advocate says

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Zhou Qiang, president of the Supreme People’s Court, delivers a work report to NPC deputies at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Tuesday. Photo: Xinhua

Xinlu Liang

Published: 5:00pm, 9 Mar 2023Updated: 1:28am, 20 May 2023

Women’s rights advocates and legal experts have called for better protection of women’s civil and political rights in China, with more transparency and a credible enforcement database, after officials listed improvements to judicial protections for women over recent years.

Chief Justice Zhou Qiang, president of the Supreme People’s Court, said China’s courts had “deepened the reform of family trials, improved systems such as family mediation, family investigation and psychological counselling, and improved the protection mechanism for women and children’s rights and interests”.

In his annual work report delivered to deputies of the National People’s Congress on Tuesday, Zhou said the courts had issued 13,000 personal safety protection orders for domestic violence victims over the past five years. By the Post’s calculation, it issued 3,882 of those personal safety protection orders in 2022, compared with just 3,356 such orders in 2021.

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Chinese women turn to self-defence classes after brutal attack on female diners in Tangshan

But Feng Yuan, co-founder of Beijing Equality, an advocacy group for women’s rights and gender equality, said the report should have also revealed the number of applications – not just the number of orders issued.

“Otherwise, you can’t tell if the approval rate has gone up or not,” Feng said, adding the database should include more specific information, such as how many protection orders were issued to female versus male applicants.

Zhang Jun, China’s top prosecutor, said the country had worked to bring human traffickers to justice.

“[China has] severely punished the crime of human trafficking. From 2021, we have cooperated with the public security organs to take special actions to dig deep into accumulated cases,” Zhang said on Tuesday as he delivered a work report for the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the country’s public prosecutor.

The report said that 3,152 people had been prosecuted for trafficking women and children over the past two years – a 16 per cent increase over the previous two years – and that 31 per cent of those prosecutions were for previously unsolved cases.