[JURIST] Human Rights Watch (HRW) [advocacy website] released a report [PDF] Wednesday detailing the continued abuse of criminal suspects by Chinese police. The interviewed detainees reported instances of torture, including being shackled to a “tiger chair” for days and being hung by the wrists. Despite detention reforms in China, including making evidence obtained through torture inadmissible, the interviewed detainees and lawyers reported that police officers sometimes used torture techniques that left no visible harm. In other cases with clear evidence of torture, it was reported that judges did not implement the “exclusionary rule” and allowed evidence obtained through torture to be used at trial. The report includes a statement from both a former judge and former police officer declaring the supervision over criminal interrogations inadequate.

The use of torture on criminal suspects to extract confessions in China has been under heavy scrutiny in recent years. In November 2013 China’s Supreme People’s Court [official website, in Mandarin] banned [JURIST report] the use of forced confessions extracted through torture. The court found that illegal methods of confession extraction, including food and sleep deprivation and temperature manipulation are unacceptable and amount to torture. This ruling was part of a broad move by the Communist Party of China (CPC) to reform the nation’s human rights situation. In 2005 a UN human rights investigator reported [JURIST report] that torture in the country was declining but still widespread.