A Research Into The Legal System On Monitoring

A newly-arisen coercive crime-detecting method, monitoring is developed in many countries to cope with new changes of crimes with a high-technological content and a high confidentiality. It plays an irreplaceable role not only in supplementing the traditional crime-detecting methods but also in cracking down some particular types of crimes. However, on the other hand, the adoption of monitoring severely invades into citizen's right to privacy, though it can help effectively spy crimes and collect evidence at the same time. Therefore, many countries have stipulated and adopted rigorous legal procedures on monitoring to prevent the authorities concerned from abusing it and infringing too much upon citizen's right. It is allowed in our country's Criminal Procedure Law that some scientific measures can be taken when conducting criminal spying, but no regulations or laws have been proclaimed in writing on technological spying, especially monitoring. To comply with the new trends of the crimes, the criminal detecting bodies of our country have employed monitoring as a technological spying method to crack down crimes in the judicial practices long before. Consequently, the displacement has occurred between the criminal procedure legislation and judicial practices in our country and it can brook no delay in normalizing and confining monitoring from a legal perspective.Thereof, the legal problems ushered in by monitoring have attracted the attention of theoretical and practical circle on criminal proceeding in our country. This paper begins with the clarification of monitoring as a concept, analyzes the conflicts on legal nature and value, and then concludes the basic principles underlying monitoring after the extensive investigation and comparison into the legal institutions on monitoring abroad. In the end, the status quo and drawbacks of the monitoring legislation in our country are summarized. Furthermore, the author presents some opinions and suggestions on the monitoring legislation which are...