On Pre-Trial Detention And Human Rights Protection

Pre-trial detention and human rights protection are the contradictory unity of opposites. As one of common compulsory means applied in the stage of criminal investigation, the main purpose of the pre-trial detention is to protect the investigation and adjudication activities of the national judicial organs and the general social benefit of the citizens' freedom and security by the necessary limitation of the suspects and the defendants' legal rights. But one of the main problems is how to protect the human rights of the suspects and the defendants while they are investigated and before brought to trial. In the relative documents of the United Nations and most counties, it is regarded that the pre-trial detention compulsory system and its application are the symbol of a country's democratic civilization to show the government's respect and protection to basic human rights. Therefore, in most countries, they strictly restrain the application of the pre-trial detention by legal control and put more emphasis to offer adequate rights to the suspects and the defendants and to protect their basic human rights.Nowadays, we have established the basic human rights protection system in the current criminal judicial field and comparatively met the standards regulated in the international conventions. But, because of our historical and cultural background, traditional ideas and the limitation of the development, we are still deeply affected so much by the traditional ideas such as more emphasis on the priority to the national authority', the criminal punishment, the substantial laws and less valuation on the protection of the basic human rights, the procedural laws that the persistent events, such as illegal pre-trial detention, the torture inquisitions, the extended pre-trial detention and the obstruction for lawyers' intervention, are still extensively existed in the judicial practices. All of these infringe upon the basic human rights of the suspects and the defendants and obstruct the realization of the judicial values of justice, freedom, order, security and benefit.In 2004, the government should respect and protect the basic human rights was written into the Chinese Constitution and it was promoted into the constitutional principle for the first time in China. Now our central government are carrying out the judicial innovation and making great effort to establish our society ruled by laws. Therefore, in order to realize the our target of the harmonious unity of criminal punishment and the protection of the basic human rights, we should improve our human rights protection system of the suspects and the defendants in the pre-trial detention in the following 5 aspects such as to change our litigation ideas, to regulate our choice of criminal litigation values, to improve our criminal compulsory system and set up the independent legal status for the pre-trial detention measure, to set up the legal examining system for the pre-trial detention activities, to protect the lawyer's assistance right to the suspects and the defendants, and to improve the national compensation system for the misfeasance and nonfeasance in the pre-trial detention compulsory acts.