The Privilege Against Self-incrimination

Since it directly concerns significant legal interests of citizens, as opposed to other department laws, criminal law can exert the most direct and strict influence upon rights of citizens, which means that it would unavoidably infringe upon fundamental human rights of citizens if it were arbitrarily applied. Therefore, protection of human rights has gradually become a foundation for the criminal rule of law, and it has inevitably imposed a requirement for improving the criminal rule of law. Meanwhile, it is also one of the main functions and purposes of the contemporary criminal law. Nowadays all countries constantly endeavor to perfect their own criminal procedural laws. In the meantime, entity authenticity and procedural justice, as two purposes of all countries’ criminal proceedings, are actually paradoxical which more often than not conflict with each other in interests throughout the whole criminal procedural proceedings. In any country, whether or not its legal system admitting the principle against forced self-crimination also reflects the tendency of its legal value in regard to publishing crimes and protecting human rights. With the development of democracy and rule of law, protection of human rights has become the target for all countries to strive for which has dominated between the two purposes of criminal proceedings. The principle against forced self-crimination, as one of the fundamental principles of contemporary criminal rule of law, embodies the respect for personal dignity, the balance between punishing crimes and protecting human rights in any country and the inevitable request for presumption of innocence, which demonstrate that it really has such crucial functions as protecting human rights, guaranteeing procedural justice, achieving lawsuit balance and rationally allocating burden of proof. This thesis, by making a research into the connotation and the origin of the principle against forced self-crimination and referring to the comparison between the corresponding provisions of the two law systems, will ponder over the Amendment to the Criminal Procedural Law passed in March14th,2012. More specifically speaking, this thesis will investigate the difference which the inclusion of that principle into the Criminal Procedural Law has made to China’s criminal rule of law and the shortcomings existing in the aspects of legislation and implementation of that principle as well as expound upon the practical impediments that principle has confronted both ideally and institutionally. The ultimate destination of all of these efforts is rightly to make a reasonable adjustment and improvement to the judicial proceedings and other supporting systems in future so as to provide a complete and sound guarantee for the realization of that principle, which could enable that principle to play its due role in China’s legal environment effectively.