Research On The Perfection Of China’s Sentencing Promise System In Pursuing Fugitives Abroad

With the rapid change and development of information technology and transportation,it is more and more convenient to travel to other countries or regions.This situation not only brings a lot of convenience to human life,but also inevitably provides a more convenient way for criminals to escape to other countries.Once the criminals step out of their own territory,the sanctions will face many obstacles,only by the cooperation between the countries from which the criminals fled and the countries to which they fled can the criminals be tracked down.Especially in recent years,China’s anti-corruption efforts have been strengthened,and the situation of criminals fleeing abroad has inevitably become more and more serious.This situation promotes China’s efforts to carry out international criminal judicial cooperation in order to pursue culprits abroad.At present,the cooperation includes extradition,repatriation,judicial assistance on narrow sense etc.But our judicial cooperation with the rest of the world is not always propitious,a huge obstacle is the principle of non-extradition of death penalty caused by different punishment ideas between different countries,the principle makes the country which abolished the death penalty seize the initiative,accordingly,the country which retained the death penalty tends to be in a passive state in the process of cooperation.In practice,the principle doesn’t only affect the extradition,but also affect repatriation and other international criminal judicial cooperation,in other words,if the country with which we cooperate has already abolished the death penalty,then in theory the country is very likely to refuse every judicial cooperation we make on the grounds of "China has not abolished the death penalty yet",causing great difficulties during the process of pursuit of our country.At this time,the sentencing promise system showed up and became the best way to solve this problem in the case that China cannot abolish the death penalty in a short time.Sentencing promise refers to the system of commitment that the requesting country makes to the requested country about the change of penalty when the requested person is tried in his own country according to the requirements of the requested country in criminal judicial cooperation.In practice,it includes the change of prison term,the change of penalty kinds and the change of penalty execution.It builds a bridge of international criminal judicial cooperation between the countries that retain the death penalty and those that abrogate the death penalty.After the country that retains the death penalty makes a sentencing promise and the country that abrogates the death penalty accepts it,the two countries will be able to reach international criminal judicial cooperation regardless of the cognitive differences at the legislative and judicial level.It can be said that the sentencing promise system is a system that not only respects the human rights cognition of the requested cooperative country,but also realizes the criminal jurisdiction of the requesting cooperative country.Its successful application is of great significance to both countries and even the whole international community.However,focusing on the present situation of our country,we didn’t pay enough attention to the sentencing promise system,thus our sentencing promise system is not perfect in both legislation and practice,so in the face of the countries that has not yet signed bilateral extradition treaty with clauses of sentencing promise,the pursuit in our country is faced with many difficulties:temporarily unable to abolish the death penalty in our country,based on the situation that our sentencing promise system is not impeccable,the sentencing promise made by our country is more and more difficult to get trusted by other countries day by day,thus the applicable rate of our country’ s sentencing promise is getting lower and lower.Based on this situation,this paper analyzes the causes of the difficulties our sentencing promise system is facing from both legislation and practice.In the legislation,there are some problems,such as the low level of legislation on sentencing promise in China,the absence of clear provisions on the application of sentencing promise system to repatriation,the absence of procedural provisions on sentencing promise in China,and the dis-conformity between sentencing promise system and the judicial jurisdiction system in China.In practice,there are some problems such as the judicial documents in our country do not reflect the effectiveness of sentencing promise,and there are differences in the ways of judicial practice between China and foreign countries.Moreover,making sure what concepts and basic principles our system shall follow,including the principle of national sovereignty,the principle of protecting human rights and the rule of law,thus to put forward the feasible countermeasures in legislation and operation about how to perfect the system of sentencing promise in our country,in order to be able to break through the current plight in the pursuit of fugitives abroad as soon as possible.