China approved extradition treaties with Afghanistan and Iran yesterday, taking the number of such treaties to 36.

Ratified by the National People's Congress Standing Committee, they are aimed at strengthening China's international judicial cooperation and benefiting the global fight against crime.

In 1994, the committee ratified a treaty with Thailand, the first of its kind, which took effect on March 7, 1999.

In 2002, Chen Manxiong and his wife Chen Qiuyuan, who misappropriated hundreds of millions of yuan in south China's Guangdong Province and fled to Thailand, were extradited back to China.

Naw Kham, head of an armed drugs gang who masterminded the murder of 13 Chinese sailors on the Mekong River in 2011, was extradited to China from Laos for investigation and trial in May 2012.

Huang Feng, professor of Beijing Normal University's Criminal Law Research Institute, said extradition could be applied to all kinds of crimes, as long as they are defined as a crime by both countries and meet provisions in the treaty.

For China, the treaties have often been used to repatriate people suspected of economic crimes, fleeing corrupt officials or terrorists, while other countries may focus on other aspects, for example, violent crime offenders or drug dealers.

In August 2010, China extradited a suspected women trafficker back to Russia.

A lack of treaties with some countries hampers China's attempts to secure the extradition of many fugitives in its anti-graft campaign.

The case of Yang Xiuzhu, former vice mayor of Wenzhou City in east China, is one example. When investigators started looking into her involvement in graft in 2003, she fled China with her family to the United States via Singapore and then to the Netherlands.

Investigators later uncovered evidence showing Yang had accepted bribes amounting to 253 million yuan (US$41 million). Through Interpol, China filed a Red Notice for her in 2006. Negotiations began but have yet to bear fruit.

On April 29, 2006, the NPC ratified an extradition treaty with Spain, the first such treaty China has signed with a developed Western country.

Xu Hong, who headed the Chinese delegation in the extradition talks, said the treaty would help China weave a global extradition net to bring back corrupt officials who have fled abroad, largely to Europe and North America.

In the treaty, China agreed that it would not execute repatriated criminals. The treaty stirred debate among Chinese legal experts and lawmakers at the time, with some fearing it might weaken anti-graft efforts by exempting runaway crime suspects from death penalty.

Other experts argued that China's use of death penalty made it hard for the country to cooperate on extradition with countries in the EU and North America which uphold a policy that no one who might be subject to the death penalty would be extradited.

Huang said that by accepting the clause of not executing repatriated criminals, China cleared up the biggest obstacle to conclude extradition treaties with certain countries.

After the treaty with Spain, China signed treaties with Australia, France, Portugal and Italy. The Australia, France and Italy treaties have yet to be ratified.

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