Strong human rights protection comes as legitimate rights in state compensation protected

Chinese courts have concluded about 220,000 cases relating to state compensation since 1995, when the State Compensation Law took effect, giving stronger protection on human rights and intensifying regulation on public power, China's top court said.

The number of state compensation cases heard by courts nationwide in 2019 was 11 times as many as that in 1995, the beginning of the law's implementation, Tao Kaiyuan, vice-president of the Supreme People's Court, the country's top court, said on Tuesday.

She said after the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012, courts at all levels handled half of the total state compensation cases in the past 25 years, adding that it shows people's increasingly enhanced awareness to safeguard their legitimate rights and also means the state compensation system has played a bigger role in protecting human rights and regulating public power."

Some of the cases have influenced the whole country and urged authorities to regulate their behaviors to prevent mistakes, especially those in which the acquitted people received payments after being wrongly detained and convicted, Tao said.

For example, Nie Shubin, a villager from North China's Hebei province, was declared innocent in 2016 as evidence in his case was not strong enough to prove his original conviction of raping and killing a woman. Nie, who was wrongly detained and sentenced to death, was executed in 1995.

After the announcement that Nie not guilty, his family received 2.68 million yuan ($410,000) in compensation.

Liu Zhumei, director of the top court's Compensation Committee Office, said they will make more effort to hearing cases relating to state compensation to further uphold justice and protect human rights.

She added they will also focus more on studying and solving new problems in handling compensation-related cases to respond to public demand on the rule of law.