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Comment by lnanek2 | Hacker News Reader

Last article I read said the mainland had a 99% conviction rate. Anyone going over there isn't getting a fair trial. They'll just be canned and counted as some official's crime fighting spree no matter if they did it or not or whatever political purpose their bodies can be put to.

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High conviction rate is not something unique to China - Canada and Japan are also at 97% and 99% respectively

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate

The difference is the conviction rate in China is over 10 times higher than that at 99.9% [1,2] and thought to be driven by political interference/corruption rather than only targeting high yield cases. Bear in mind the context of china’s top court rejecting the notion of an independent judiciary [3], it is clear there is a difference between a high conviction rate in these countries and China.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/03/1... [2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/121932... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/26/chinas-top-cou...

>The difference is the conviction rate in China is over 10 times higher

Actually, it's not over 10 times higher; I double checked, Japan's is also 99.9% and has been for some time.

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_system_of_Jap...

Statistics from Wikipedia link: http://hakusyo1.moj.go.jp/en/61/image/image/h002003001001h.j...

If you just take guilty/not guilty, the % is actually 99.98% in Japan (e.g. 2011, 77 Not Guilty, 432,050 Guilty)

That’s interesting, thanks for the correction. That’s actually also concerning. Either they are are prosecuting enough people, and letting criminals go free, or the legal system is broken (or perhaps a huge cultural difference I’m missing). What is the point in hiring a defence lawyer if the chance of successful defence is so low? I can’t think of any test in my area of expertise (medicine) that has such a high success rate, meaning that false positives must be much too high for comfort.

The mainland conviction rate doesn't matter. It's about the HK criminal laws and whether the case in question was sentenced a 7 year prison term under HK law before extradition is even in question (if it's simultaneously a crime under the target country's law).

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