China will step up fight against illegally prolonged detention by implementing more stringent monitoring system across the country, the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) announced in Nanjing Friday.

Public supervisors are entitled to oversee the monitoring work conducted by China's procurator offices on illegally prolonged custody involving criminal suspects, according to Zhang Geng, the executive deputy procurator-general of the SPP.

"In the past, the public supervisors could only oversee illegally-prolonged custody cases relating to white-collar crimes," Zhang noted at an on-going national meeting.

China introduced the system of public supervisors in August 2003, in which procuratorate authority invites people from all walks of life to act as "public supervisors" for better monitoring of the work of judicial departments, aiming to ensure justice and curb wrong verdicts.

By the end of this June, 2,825 procuratorates who are experimenting the new system have selected and appointed 20,848 public supervisors.

Zhang asked the procurator offices at various levels to trace each procedure of the people in custody and set up relevant profiles for the reference of public supervisors.

The supervisors should also be invited to inspect sites for detention and carry out law enforcement checkup.

"It's a move to further establish a supervisory mechanism to prevent and redress illegally-prolonged custody cases," Zhang said.

According to China's Criminal Procedure Law, criminal suspects can be legally held for anywhere from 14 days to six-and-a-half-months before they must be brought to trial.

The number of China's illegally prolonged custody cases has dropped to a record low in recent years, thanks to the stringent regulation which said officers who unlawfully prolonged a suspect's custody should be given criminal penalty.

Illegally prolonged custody, however, remains a long-term headache in the country's law enforcement sector. In some areas, the number of law enforcers could not meet the actual demands, causing cases that could not be investigated and tried on time and finally extended criminal suspect's custody term.

In addition, some cases were too complicated to finish investigation within the suspect's custody term.
 
(Xinhua News Agency September 2, 2006)