Report submitted to all china lawyers association on the establishment of a separate lawyer meeting facility in Shanghai Detention Center;
The Criminal Business Committee of Shanghai Lawyers Association has prepared a written letter to reflect this issue to the National Lawyers Association before receiving the Notice of Soliciting the Opinions of Local Lawyers on the Application for a Separate Meeting Room for Lawyers in Public Security Detention Centers (No.42 [2005] of the National Lawyers Association). The following report is about the situation in Shanghai.
I. Basic information
There are 19 counties and districts in Shanghai, and there are 2 1 detention centers, including 19 county detention centers and 2 municipal detention centers (excluding Baosteel detention center, Shanghai Port detention center, railway system detention center, military prison detention center and state security organ detention center). Before the first half of last year, there were basically no special isolation facilities in the lawyer meeting room of the detention center. A few detention centers separate the interrogation room from the interview room due to conditions, but there is no glass partition, so there is no need for telephone conversation (Changning District Detention Center has a glass partition interview room, but it is not required to use it, and lawyers can meet in the interrogation room).
However, since the second half of 2004, Hongkou District Detention Center has separated the lawyer interview room from the arraignment room and set up a glass barrier for the lawyer interview room. Subsequently, the Pudong New Area Detention Center and the Shanghai Detention Center followed suit and began to build separately (according to incomplete statistics, about half of the detention centers will be started soon). According to the information we got, the detention center in Shanghai will be gradually unified into a separate setting with glass partitions.
It is particularly worth mentioning that in Pudong New Area, Shanghai, which is the frontier and model of reform and opening up, the original lawyer meeting room is an oval table, and lawyers are completely equal to the parties when meeting, sitting face to face at the same table. On the contrary, when the case-handling organ interrogates a criminal suspect or defendant, it must do it in an interrogation room separated by iron bars to prevent extorting confessions by torture. This advanced practice, which truly meets international standards, has now been replaced by backward separation facilities.
Many lawyers have raised objections to the detention center in different ways, but the answers they get are all on the grounds of protecting lawyers or following the instructions of their superiors.
Second, the influence of isolation facilities on lawyers' work.
1. Obstructing the communication between the parties and lawyers: Shanghai stipulates that violent crimes and female crimes must be met by two lawyers at the same time. Once you need to make a phone call, it is either impossible to achieve three-way communication or inconvenient to record.
2. At the same time, there have been two meetings that interfere with each other: at present, the two meeting rooms of Hongkou Detention Center and Pudong New Area Detention Center are not isolated, and the parties and lawyers influence and interfere with each other.
3, unable to sign legal documents, unable to identify and verify evidence: due to the glass barrier, lawyers need to sign legal documents or show evidence to the parties for identification and verification, and must re-apply to the guards for punishment or be forwarded by them, which is very troublesome.
4. Man-made waste of resources: the arraignment room and the interview room are separated, and lawyers can only meet in the interview room, and the case-handling organ is only willing to arraignment in the arraignment room. When the interview room appears or the arraignment room is idle, it cannot be effectively coordinated, resulting in a waste of resources. At the same time, because the number of lawyer interview rooms is generally less than that of arraignment rooms, it actually constitutes discrimination.
Three. Solutions and suggestions
Although setting up a separate interview room can protect the personal safety of lawyers, according to the analysis of the current situation of criminal pending criminals in China, lawyers should not be easily infringed by the parties. On the contrary, criminal suspects and defendants are more vulnerable to the injury of the case-handling organs. Therefore, the original practice of Pudong New Area Detention Center is undoubtedly advanced and correct.
As for a few lawyers who use the arraignment room to illegally collect letters and articles for their clients, or a few are attacked by their clients. First of all, there is a lawyer's practice discipline, and if the circumstances are serious, the lawyer's responsibility for illegal crimes can be investigated according to law; Secondly, the responsibility of protecting lawyers from infringement should not be borne by lawyers themselves, and all protective measures should be based on the premise of not damaging the right of defense of the parties. Therefore, the Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers adopted by the Eighth United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders held in Havana from 65438 to 0990 stipulated that investigation organs should "monitor within the scope of seeing but not hearing". It is a waste of food to restrict the meeting on this ground.
To sum up, we suggest:
1, immediately stop the implementation of the Code for Architectural Design of Detention Center;
2. Detention centers that have implemented this standard should remove the isolation glass and replace it with iron railings. If conditions permit, it should be restored to its original state, and the number of interview rooms and arraignment rooms should be roughly balanced;
3. If it is really difficult to recover, it shall ensure that lawyers can use the arraignment room for interviews when the arraignment room is free.
4. Any future amendments should conform to the spirit of international human rights conventions to which China is a party, and at least the opinions of the Bar Association should be sought.
To the Shanghai Lawyers Association.
Criminal Business Committee of Shanghai Lawyers Association 1 1 month 16, 2005