On The System Of Criminal Evidence Preservation

Since the formal implementation of the Amendment to the criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China in 2012, it has put forward an even higher demand on the way to collect evidence by the establishment of the principle of respecting and protecting human rights and the principle of excluding illegally obtained evidence. Therefore, the original unilateral collection of evidence by the investigation organ has not only become unsuitable for the existing criminal litigation system, but also appears not in line with the megatrends of China’s criminal procedure reform that gradually turns its focus to adversary system and become process centered. The criminal evidence preservation system refers to a judicial proceeding during which the judicial organ preserves and fixes the evidence through a legal procedure applied to it by the parties concerned, the counsel or the agent ad litem involved in a criminal procedure in case the evidence maybe forged, lost or hard to obtain in the future. As a new evidence collecting way, the criminal evidence preservation system not only better protects the rights of the parties concerned and highlights their subject status, but also has an irreplaceable role in ascertaining the facts in relation to the case. China’s failure to establish criminal evidence preservation system over a long period of time is largely because of its incompleteness in terms of the mechanism for criminal trials and the counsel system. However, with the country’s increasing focus on the rights of the party concerned and the steadily advancing of judicial reform, China now has the appropriate theories and context to establish the criminal evidence preservation system in its criminal law.