[JURIST] China’s highest court, the Supreme People’s Court [official website, in Chinese] will investigate ways of reducing the number of crimes punishable by death according to remarks by Hu Yunteng, a senior researcher at the Supreme People’s Court, published Monday. Hu told [Reuters report] a group of academics Saturday that the government must reduce the use of the death penalty and use the death penalty with care to prevent the execution of innocent individuals, according to the Supreme People’s Court official newspaper the People’s Court Daily [official website, in Chinese]. While the Chinese government does not publish the exact number of executions each year, the San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation [advocacy website] estimated that 2,400 people were executed in 2013.

The statement from the Supreme People’s Court is the most recent acknowledgment of a reform movement by the Chinese government to reduce executions in the country. In October proposed legislation that would eliminate the death penalty as punishment for nine crimes was submitted [JURIST report] to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC) [BBC backgrounder]. The NPC has previously contemplated [JURIST report] reducing the number of crimes punishable by death, announcing in March that various government departments were studying possible changes. In 2011 the NPC amended the national criminal law to remove 13 offenses [JURIST report] from the list of crimes subject to the death penalty. Those removed were non-violent economic crimes, including smuggling cultural relics, precious metals and rare animals; fraudulent activities with financial bills and letters of credit; fraudulent export tax refunds; teaching of crime-committing methods; and robbing ancient cultural ruins.