Translation of China’s 2013
Criminal Procedure Law
About
The U.S. Asia Law Institute (USALI) at the NYU School of Law is very pleased to announce the online publication of an English-language translation of the new Supreme People’s Court (SPC) Judicial Interpretation, the new Supreme People’s Procuratorate (SPP) Judicial Interpretation, and the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) Regulations implementing China’s 2013 Criminal Procedure Law (CPL). Links to the full text are located at the bottom of this page.
While Chinese statutory law in the field of criminal justice is often translated, implementing regulations and SPC or SPP interpretations often are not. Therefore, we see this as part of furthering our goals of providing public service to the China law community, and we strive hard to make this information freely available to as many people as possible. To that end, we encourage and thank you in advance for taking advantage of it and further distributing it to friends, colleagues, and anyone to whom you think this information might be of interest.
We worked very hard on the translation to make it as accurate as possible, but it is by no means perfect or authoritative – nor it is meant to be. For example, there are Chinese legal terms for which no standard English translation exists, and there are times when a literal translation does not always capture the gist of the meaning. When coming across those terms, a conscious decision has been made to err on the side of consistency and loyalty to the original. In furtherance of this goal and to assist translators and reviewers in making decisions concerning those terms, we have, as we went along, developed a Glossary that contains selected terms from the Chinese text that we thought could use some unification. The Glossary is published along with the translation, and you are welcome to download it and refer to it when in doubt about the translation of a word/term/clause/sentence.
USALI is privileged to publish this translation on our newly-remodeled website, but this is by all means a joint-effort project. USALI staff were very pleased to work with the Danish Institute for Human Rights (DIHR), International Bridges to Justice (IBJ), and a group of amazing volunteer translators, for the past few months on this very important effort. USALI would like to take this opportunity to extend sincere thanks to DIHR and IBJ for the support, coordination, and substantive work that they have provided, and also to the individuals, whose names are listed below, for their invaluable contribution to a high-quality work.