[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

June 18



CHINA:

Online petition seeking death penalty for child traffickers goes viral



It turns out that Chinese social media is not only for popularizing ridiculous 
fitness challenges, but can also be used, from time to time, to draw attention 
to more serious social issues. In the past few days, an appeal to institute the 
death penalty against all those convicted of child trafficking has gained a 
significant following online and launched a substantial debate on the subject.

The campaign was initiated with a photo captioned: "China should change its 
legislation on child trafficking. People trafficking children should be 
sentenced to death. Why should they be given a second chance when the children 
they harmed don't get any?" In less than 2 days, the post has been viewed more 
than 1.5 million times on Weibo and has been shared by thousands of supporters 
on Weibo and WeChat.

Advocates behind the campaign said they were stirred to action after following 
news reports of a child trafficking case prosecuted last month in Henan. Of the 
37 suspects, only the prime suspect received a death sentence, while the other 
members of the gang were given a maximum of 15 years in prison, with the buyers 
involved being sentenced to just 7 months.

A recent poll on Sina found that 88.3 % of the more than 21,000 respondents 
were unsatisfied with China's crackdown on child trafficking with 92.5 % 
recommending that the same punishment imposed on traffickers should also be 
applied to buyers in order to stop the lucrative trade in children.

Earlier today, CCTV News reported on the debate raging online and said that the 
argument centers mainly around whether capital punishment will be able to stop 
child trafficking. The scholars and sociologists they talked to happened to all 
agree that it would not and that the crimes must be handled rationally with 
more severe punishments doled out to buyers in order to bring down the great 
demand that makes profits so enticingly high for child traffickers.

Moreover, CCTV quoted Jiang Xiaoyan, a legal scholar, who said that we must 
think of the children before electing to administer the death penalty on their 
kidnappers: "If all child traffickers were sentenced to death, the criminals 
will turn to desperados and the abducted children will be in danger (they may 
kill them)."

CCTV also spoke with Gu Yongzhong, a law professor at China University of 
Political Science and Law, who argued against the efficacy of laws altogether: 
"The power of penal laws is actually limited. Although [there is a Chinese 
saying that] 'a murderer must repay with his own life' but murders have never 
been stopped."

Currently China only sentences human traffickers to death in severe cases - 
including those who organized large-scale child trafficking gangs or used 
violence to abduct children. Child traffickers are generally given 5 to 10 
years in prison depending on the nature of their crimes.

Child trafficking is a serious problem in China and the extent of the problem 
is not reliably known. Traffickers capitlize on the huge demand for healthy 
babies, particularly boys, brought on as unintended consequence of the 1-child 
policy and traditional attitudes in China valuing sons over daughters. China 
now has a national anti-kiddnapping taskforce that carries out high-profile 
raids that sometimes liberate hundreds (or thousands) of kidnapped children.

The exact scale of child trafficking is hard to know since official data is 
difficult to come by. CCTV reports that 7,700 human trafficking cases were 
reported in China from 2010 to 2014, with more than 12,900 traffickers and 
buyers punished. The number of cases has been decreasing since 2013.

(source: shanghaiist.com)