Why is the law prohibiting forced confession in 209 cases, leaving only two court investigations?

Whether a judicial system really prohibits torture does not depend on the word “forbidden confession” in the law, but on who investigates after someone accuses himself of being tortured, who holds the evidence, and who bears responsibility.53-page report by the Human Rights Defenders Network (CHRD) on September 16The group examined the torture and other allegations of abuse of 209 prisoners of conscience between 2016 and 2025, but found only court investigation records in the two cases of Deng Xiaoping and Huang Zhen; in these samples, no public records of criminal prosecution or disciplinary punishment of enforcement officials were found.

The core contradiction that can be seen from this set of samples is not China’s lack of a prohibition on torture, but the chain of allegations to enter the investigation, evidence to be reviewed, and illegal evidence-gathering procedures that rarely leave public records.China's Criminal Procedure Law Explicitly Prohibits Criminal ConfessionIn addition, the prosecutor's office found that investigators illegally obtained evidence, and has the responsibility to investigate and verify and correct it. The 2017 illegal evidence exclusion provisions further excluded cases such as beating, unlawful use of ringtones, altered carnage and serious threats to the rights and interests of themselves or close relatives. The system design is not empty, the key is how these rules are grounded.

The problem does not only occur in the interrogation room, but the detention itself can also become a pressuring environment.

CHRD statistics showed that of these 209 samples, about one-fifth included allegations of beating and 15 percent involved allegations of torture in order to obtain confessions; the higher proportion was deprivation of medical care, reaching 35 percent. At least 16 detainees to die without receiving the necessary treatment. Torture and abuse therefore did not only manifest as electric shocks, beating or compulsive postures. Control over drugs, referrals, sleep, diet, meetings and medical records may also be part of ongoing pressure.

The difficulty of such cases is that key evidence is often held within the detention and investigation system. Interrogation videos, detention surveillance, clinical records, referral examination, record of use of ringworms and logs of duty determine whether an accusation can turn from a party’s statement to an externally verified case.

Din Hihi and Yuan Chen became the names of the few who entered the court investigation records

CHRD said that in its 209 samples, only Deng Xiaoping and Yuan Xiaoping were able to find records of court investigation allegations of torture, and both courts eventually said no evidence of torture was found. The report also records the Qigong case: the court had ruled out a confession found to have been obtained through abuse, which was the only case of related confession found by the organization in this sample, but Qigong was still convicted.

If the illegal evidence exclusion system is stable, theoretically more traceable investigation, exclusion and prosecution records should be formed.The CHRD sample records are very few, indicating a significant decline in the implementation of the system in at least these political and human rights cases. For the prosecutors, the real constraints are not the rules themselves, but whether breaches of the rules lead to evidence being excluded, cases being corrected, or the consequences of individual liability.

Designated residence surveillance housing pushes evidence issues to more closed spaces

CHRD also listed “determined residence surveillance” as a high-risk link. United Nations human rights experts have previously expressed concerns about secret or isolated detention, limited lawyer meetings, and inadequate external supervision. For people placed in highly closed environments, whether they can have timely contact with lawyers, family and independent doctors to decide whether there is an opportunity to leave external evidence directly against allegations of abuse.

This is why the question of torture cannot be understood only as the illegal collection of evidence by individual prosecutors.When the investigative agency controls the detention space, the regulatory system controls the medical and surveillance records, and complaints need to be handled in the same power chain, the issue extends further to the right to investigate and the control of evidence.Who can initiate the investigation, who can collect the original material, and who can review the authority's own claims, determining whether the anti-torture rules can really work.

The distance between legal clauses and real constraints is ultimately measured by accountability

China has banned forced confessions in its domestic law and is a party to the Convention on the Prohibition of Torture. In the past, when the UN Committee on the Prohibition of Torture reviewed China's compliance, it has raised concerns about lawyer contact, secret detention, investigation of torture complaints and the situation of human rights defenders. CHRD's 209 cases presented in this report are not national judicial statistics, but provide a clear window of observation: in a number of long-term cases tracked by human rights organizations, torture and abuse allegations are rare, and public records of genuine access to court investigations, illegal evidence exclusion and individual prosecution are extremely limited.

The most important information in this report is not to repeat “torture is illegal,” as Chinese law has long stated, but to show what happened after the ban. If the complaint is difficult to stabilize into independent investigation, and the key evidence is mainly within the complaint system, and the illegal evidence is rarely personal responsibility, then the prohibition of forced confession is difficult to turn into a practical constraint on public authority.