China has been quietly restricting the widespread abuse of a form of detention legal critics believe is a key source of illegal interrogation that has led to multiple deaths and blocked suspects’ access to lawyers.
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There has been no official announcement of the changes. But last month, a leaked file of new guidelines circulated online, adding supervision and restricting the way the measure, known as residential surveillance at a designated location (RSDL), is approved and executed.
RSDL was originally included in China’s Criminal Procedure Law in 1979 as a form of mild restriction of personal freedom, similar to house arrest.
But in a key amendment in 2012, the law stipulated that it could apply to those suspected of serious crimes such as terrorism and state security charges, which pundits argued marked a turning point in how RSDL was applied.
Over the years, it has been frequently used by police in organised crime and state security cases, and later expanded to less serious crimes, with suspects often locked up in special facilities and tortured.
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China’s legal community has repeatedly tried to address the issue. As early as 2015, Sun Qian, then deputy prosecutor general of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, said in an article that some local governments regarded RSDL as a convenient tool for solving cases, favouring its use because it isolates the suspects, prevents them from receiving outside information and occupies all of their time.