guilty without a legal verdict by the people’s court”, has been put forward by some scholars as the Chinese concept of presumed innocence. The right to silence, however, is not guaranteed and suspects are expected to cooperate in the criminal investigation. Article 120 (CPL.18) requires suspects to answer the investigator’s questions truthfully, although they also have the right to refuse to answer questions that are irrelevant to the case. Suspects have the right to defence, but defence rights are circumscribed (see Chapter 5) and there is an onus on the defence to provide evidence that the suspect is “not guilty” (CPL.18 Art.37), despite statements that the burden of proof of guilt in public prosecutions falls on the procuratorate (CPL.18 Art.51). A number of high profile miscarriage of justice cases have spurred efforts to provide some protection for the innocent. The recently revised Organic Law of the People’s Courts has a general provision to “ensure the innocent are not prosecuted”. Nevertheless, “declared innocent” performance indicators may result in a negative assessment of procurators’ work. In Chinese courts the conviction rate remains very high, at around 99%, and obtaining a not-guilty verdict is difficult in judicial practice. There is still no single, unified evidence law, but there have been calls from Chinese academic circles and moves to draft one. Some criminal legal scholars and experts in China are arguing that the evidence law should reflect Safeguard Four and insist on leaving no room for an alternative explanation of facts. However, serious problems in the collection and examination of evidence as well as the exclusion of illegal evidence remain. There is a lack of specific training and education for police, judges and lawyers on different types of evidence at the university level, with some courses only offering elective rather than mandatory courses. Legal experts cite this as a serious problem in the use of evidence in death penalty trials. Confessions In Chinese law, a defendant cannot be convicted and sentenced to criminal punishment based on their confession alone without other evidence. Conviction must be based on “hard and sufficient evidence”. However, Chinese legal practice places a strong reliance on a confession for conviction in serious criminal cases, leading to the risk of extortion through torture. In response to high profile miscarriages of justice that came to light in the mid-2000s, there has been some progress in emphasising the importance of evidence other than confessions, and with measures to exclude illegally obtained evidence. The Criminal Procedure Law, article 50, already prohibited the extortion of confessions (xingxun bigong). Enhanced measures on the exclusion of evidence obtained through torture, as well as increased emphasis on other types of evidence, were introduced in 2010. The ‘two rules of evidence,’ addressed the examination and judgement of evidence in death penalty cases and exclusion of evidence in criminal cases. They were incorporated into the Criminal Procedure Law in 2012. The rules were widely regarded as progress by Chinese legal scholars and academics. They try to set out standards in criminal trials for the examination of evidence and the exclusion of evidence unlawfully obtained through coercion. This was the first time that measures were introduced to exclude such evidence. In a significant step, the new rules required the recording or audiotaping of interviews with 28