Liu Renwen :Chinese Supreme Court judge gets life term

BEIJING, Jan. 20 -- A Chinese former supreme court judge was sentenced to life in prison Tuesday for corruption, making him the most senior judicial figure convicted in China on such charges.

Huang Songyou, 52, was convicted of accepting more than 3.9 million yuan ($570,000) in bribes from four lawyers in return for favorable rulings from 2005 to 2008 as the Supreme People's Court (SPC) vice president, and embezzling 1.2 million yuan of government funds in 1997 when he was president of a city-level court in Guang-dong Province.

According to a verdict by the Intermediate People's Court of Langfang City, in north China's Hebei Province, Huang was stripped of his political rights for life, and all of his properties were confiscated.

Huang, expelled from the Communist Party of China (CPC) in August, was among 15 ministerial or provincial-level officials, a record in 30 years, brought down last year, many for allegedly trading their power for money during the country's economic boom.

The sentence was interpreted by the Associated Press as "part of a continuing battle by the CPC against deep-seated corruption."

President Hu Jintao has described corruption as one of the greatest threats to the legitimacy of the CPC's rule and last week called the anti-corruption campaign a "pressing task."

Pu Zhiqing, a Beijing lawyer, told the Global Times Tuesday that Huang was both "unlucky and lucky" in this case.

"He is unlucky because many officials who committed similar crimes who remain at large," Pu explained. "He is lucky because he deserves the death penalty as he, being such a senior offi-cial, has shaken the public's confidence in and respect for the judicial system."

The court verdict said Huang has already been "punished severely" because he knowingly violated the law as a grand justice of the second rank, though the majority of the money taken illegally had been retrieved. It was not immediately known whether Huang will appeal.

The SPC, having 13 grand justices, is the highest judicial body in China with wide-ranging powers including overseeing lower courts and reviewing death sentences.

Four other judges from the SPC are involved in Huang's case. One of them was sentenced in September to three years in prison for taking 100,000 yuan in bribes.

Disgraced judiciary

Huang Huixing, a law expert and a member of the Law Committee of the National People's Congress, told the Southern Metropolis Daily that Huang Songyou's case was a disgrace to China's judicial circles, and the severity of corruption inside the system has reached an unbearable level.

The Guangzhou Daily reported this month that one in five corrupt officials involved in bribery is from the judiciary, citing a work report of the Supreme People's Procuratorate at the annual sessions of the country's legislature and political advisory body in early 2009.

A total of 13,000 officials across the nation were found guilty of taking bribes. Among whom, 2,620 belonged to judicial departments, according to the report. Judges accounted for more than 30 percent of the 2,620 civil servants arrested for corruption, it said.

Liu Renwen, a researcher of criminal law at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, noted that judicial departments play an increasingly significant role in Chinese society, as the country improves the rule of law.

"Some power has shifted from the party committee to judicial organs. But there was a failure to carry out proper monitoring," Liu said.

The SPC launched an anti-corruption drive last year after Huang Songyou was removed from his position in October 2008. The number of cases of law violations inside the courts investigated in the first eight months of 2009 was 51 percent higher than a year earlier.

"Many secret deals are made under the table. Now I even dare not attend the get-togethers of former classmates, as many of them are now lawyers," a judge in Shanghai was quoted by the Guangzhou Daily as saying.

Pu Zhiqiang noted that Huang Songyou's case is not uncommon, and many lawyers have degraded themselves into brokers between judges and parties involved.

"They are pursuing money or power and have become parasites of the legal system," Pu said. "I hope this case will send a warning signal to them."

Previous reports also revealed that Huang Songyou lived a "corrupt" life and was accused of being a "predator of sex" who had a special interest in teenage girls. The accusation was not mentioned in Tuesday's trial.

"More than 95 percent of major cases investigated and solved by the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection involved the issue of corrupt officials keeping mistresses," Qi Peiwen, an official of the commission, said last year.

Zhang Jing, a prosecutor from East China's Jiangsu Province, told the Global Times that she believes judicial officials, including judges and prosecutors, should observe a higher level of morals.

"We've witnessed many stories of ups and downs of officials who failed to resist the lure of money or sex," she said. "The best way to protect justice and yourself is to follow working procedures."

(Source: Global Times)

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