Study On Legislative Assurance Of Chinese Prisoners' Meeting Right

The Constitution of People's Republic of China values and safeguards the human rights. Even though the prisoners are special population who are sentenced to punishment due to crimes, they are still citizens and enjoy the human rights which belong to citizens and have not been deprived of in accordance with the law. Meeting right is one of the fundamental human rights of the prisoners. To safeguard the realization of the rights and interests of meeting right is both an inevitable requirement of human rights development in China, and a reasonable choice to encourage the prisoners to reform actively in prison and to improve the reform efficiency through kinship and emotional influence. Meanwhile, prohibiting prisoners from meeting their children will undoubtedly bring psychological impacts on the children. To safeguard the meeting right of prisoners could ensure their children to have the parental emotional needs that is necessary in their growing process so as to minimize the impact from imprisonment on the children and to ensure their healthy growth.The 48^th and 57^th Articles of the existing Prison Law of China provides express terms while some other relating regulations also provide supplemental provisions in terms of meeting right so as to lay a legal foundation for it. However, there exists some problems in operations. The authoritative rule of legal provision “ can meet”presents great uncertainty to the realization of meeting right. There is no unified, basic and clear restrictive rules of the supporting system concerning the meeting right realization, thus the realization of meeting right is hard to achieve. The environment to exercise meeting right is harsh, which gives rise to a low level of realization of rights and interests. The regulations relating to meeting right tort is ambiguous, and to provide right relief is difficult. The concept of safeguarding prisoners' right cannot be fully accepted leading to a situation that punishment and reform be all the work in prison. Therefore, the rights of prisoners cannot get any attention even get neglected.What is worse, they cannot get relief regardless of several times of rights beinginfringed. From the perspective of regulations, one of the reasons to these problems are unscientific legislative notions of the Prison Law and relating regulations and prejudiced legislative principles. Thus we need to change our idea to an idea that attaches importance to punishment and reform of prisoners as well as acknowledgement and guarantee of their rights. We need to adhere to the Best Interests of the Child Doctrine, to provide express terms to the meeting right and its restrictive conditions, and to provide sufficient and operable legal ground for safeguarding rights of prisoners from the perspective of legislation.