On The Perfection Of Human Rights Protection Approach For Parole And Commutation System

As the last link of criminal judicature, punishment execution plays a role as the last line of defense in safeguarding social fairness and justice. Commutation and parole are the most important and common forms of punishment execution changes. The performance of commutation and parole is directly relevant to social fairness and justice and also reflects the real level of a nation’s guarantee of human rights. The promulgation of the Eighth Amendments to Criminal Law and especially the Guiding Opinions on the Regulation of Commutation, Parole and Temporary Service of Sentence outside Prison to Prevent Judicial Corruption, issued in April,2014 by the Political and Judiciary Commission under the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, both significantly influence the execution in practice. At the same time, the procedure specification and strict restriction of commutation, parole and temporary service of sentence outside prison embody the trend of severe execution for felonry and "the three kinds of criminals" (involving official crime, the crime of disrupting the order of financial administration and financial fraud as well as the crime of gathering underworld organization). Thus, it is important to pay much more attention to the guarantee of human rights related to commutation and parole under this legal background.This paper elaborates the ways to improve the guarantee of human rights from seven aspects, including the protection of criminal’s rights of commutation and parole, the rights protection of criminal victims, the individualized consideration of commutation and parole system, the establishment of commutation and parole appealing system, the improvement in transparency of commutation and parole procedure, the time management of commutation and parole as well as the parole application with guarantee of human rights. As one of the interested party of commutation and parole, criminals are restricted to exercise their rights due to the absence of personal freedom in prison for a long term; meanwhile, the human rights of victims, another interested party, are always ignored. Although the judicial department has issued a number of judicial interpretation and regulations for years to protect criminals’ legal rights and interests in the procedure of commutation and parole, the condition of guarantee of human rights for them is still at a low level. Academic circles have conducted in-depth and extensive study on the guarantee of human rights for victims and achieved a lot, but research results have not been promoted to the legislative level, also lacking operability. Therefore, the existing procedure of commutation and parole should be reformed and improved. Specifically, it is necessary to further regulate procedure, perfect top-level design, reinforce supervision, improve process relief and in the meantime, make the procedure more open and promote the participation of the interested parties and justice of adjudication, in order to effectively prevent judicial corruption in the process of punishment execution and to raise the level of guarantee of human rights related to commutation and parole.