CHINA. EXECUTION POLICY KEEPS FUGITIVES SAFE ABROAD

China's lack of key extradition treaties and heavy hand with the death penalty was allowing many escaped corrupt officials to stay far from the arm of Chinese law, the state-run Xinhua Daily Telegraph reported.
"It is very difficult to get corrupt officials back from their main 'destination countries', such as the United States, Japan and Canada, because China has not signed extradition treaties with those nations," Chu Huaizhi, a law professor at Beijing University, was quoted as saying.
Chu said China's use of the death penalty for non-violent crimes made the extradition process even more difficult, as many countries refused to send back foreign nationals who could faced possible execution.
For years, some Chinese legal experts had called for limits on death sentences in non-violent cases, Chu said, adding if corrupt officials were not afraid of facing execution, many of them might not choose to flee the country. "But Chinese people's cries for severe punishment of corrupt officials are very loud and you have to consider the country's needs to stem graft. A decision on whether or not to keep imposing the death penalty for non-violent crimes will require further debate and experiments," he was quoted as saying.