In the first half of this year, the National People's Congress (NPC), China's top legislature, also widely solicited public opinions for a draft amendment to the Law on the Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests. Meanwhile, an amendment to the Administrative Procedural Law, which sets the basic criterion for "administrative litigations," has been included in the NPC's legislative agenda in 2013.

"I am always amazed that China developed a complete legal system in 40 years' time," said Zwart, who has studied China's human rights situation for 10 years. "It took European nations centuries. China has a wonderfully working proper legal system. I think strongly of all the initiatives that have been taken to allow citizens to participate in governance."

Luo also said in his speech that the re-education through labor system, an administrative detention system to punish minor offenders that has become increasingly controversial, would be ceased within the year. He added that there are planned reforms of the petition system, which is also criticized by some for perceived faults in its implementation. He added that relevant departments are in the process of exploring potential alternatives and adjustments, and petitioning cases involving laws and lawsuits are hopefully to be separated from ordinary ones.

China has enforced strict controls over and prudently applied the death penalty while protecting the rights of detainees.

In February 2011, the NPC Standing Committee approved Amendment VIII to the Criminal Law, which removes the death penalty for 13 economic and nonviolent crimes, reducing death penalty charges by nearly one fifth. The amendment also adopted restrictive regulations relating to the application of the death penalty to offenders aged 75 or above at the time of trial.

Before that, the Supreme People's Court and Supreme People's Procuratorate jointly issued regulations in June 2010, requiring more stringent standards on the review and judgment of evidence involved in death penalty cases. The amended Criminal Procedure Law requires that all retrials for death penalty cases must be held publicly and that supervision over death sentence retrials be tightened.

"A fundamental principle of the rule of law is the separation of powers so as to avoid their concentration, which, as experience shows, often leads to abuses of power," said Christophe Peschoux, an official from the office of the UN Commissioner for Human Rights, while making a speech at the forum.

At the beginning of the year, China launched a new round of reform to transform governmental functions. This reform puts an emphasis on the regulation of governmental power, the decentralization of power and how it is granted to the market and society. Scrapping excess administrative examination and approval procedures is the central point of the reform.

In the past 11 years, the Chinese Government has abolished or adjusted administrative examination and approval procedures for 2,497 items, accounting for 69.3 percent of the total. The current government aims to reduce more than one third of the remaining 1,700 items requiring administrative examination and approval within its five-year term in office, which ends in 2018. These items involve all departments of the State Council, China's cabinet.

Keeping cyberspace clean

Combating false rumors online while not violating people's freedom of speech was a hot topic at the forum.

"People have the right to gather information and express their opinions and they also have the right to protect their reputation and privacy. So a balance has to be found," said Zwart. He admitted that striking such a balance is no easy task for government decision-makers and he agreed that there is no uniform way to accomplish this balance as national conditions vary.

"These boundary discussions on what you can allow people to say and what should be prohibited [on the Internet] will continue forever," he said.

As part of China's campaign to crack down on organized online misinformation spreading, people who post defamatory comments online will face up to three years in prison if their statements are widely reposted and shared, according to a legal interpretation jointly released by the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate on September 9.

The document stipulates that people will face defamation charges if false rumors they post online are viewed by more than 5,000 Internet users or re-posted more than 500 times.

"A responsible society cannot allow people on the Internet to spread lies about other people," Westgarth said. "The Internet is one of the places where individual rights have to be balanced with the rights of society in order to exist peacefully and harmoniously."

"We must educate people about the rights they have and that knowledge should be evenly spread. It is not enough to have human rights knowledge just among officials and academics," said Yvonne Mokgoro, former Chairwoman of the South Africa Law Reform Commission. "It is important that ordinary people also know, understand and appreciate the rights they have."

Due to differences in history, culture, social systems and the levels of economic development, each country will certainly have its development mode of human rights, and all countries should learn from each other to improve themselves, Cai said.

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