Compared to their Chinese counterparts, foreign prisoners are more likely to suffer while serving their term. (Photo : Getty Images)
Getting locked up abroad is one of the worst case scenarios a foreigner can encounter during his travels, and that is the case with many foreign inmates locked up in Chinese prison cells.
Compared to their Chinese counterparts, foreign prisoners are more likely to suffer while serving their term. Some feel depressed, while others experience increasing isolation, according to an article by the Global Times.
To lessen their suffering, various Chinese prisons have taken it upon themselves to be a little more sensitive.
"Foreigners are kept in China's prisons if they commit crimes in China," said Gao Xiudong, a professor of law at China Foreign Affairs University, in an interview with the Global Times.
"Those foreign inmates are always placed in high-level prisons," Gao added.
As a means to protect their rights, foreign inmates are allowed to carry out the rest of their term in their homeland as stipulated in bilateral agreements.
Extradition Assistance Covered by Treaties
Based on data from the Ministry of Justice, China has signed treaties with over 70 nations, including Canada, South Africa, Thailand, U.S, and Spain. These treaties cover assistance on a number of things such as extradition, religious extremism, separatism, and terrorism.
"Foreign inmates being extradited and transferred is part of normal international judicial cooperation, which is beneficial for the reform of foreign inmates and alleviates our pressure," said He Fang, a lawyer in Shanghai, in an interview with nfdaily.cn in 2010.
Chinese courts, however, have the right to sentence foreign inmates to death. As a result, China also has the right to execute those with sentenced to death.
This was the case with a Japanese man who was charged guilty of selling illegal narcotics on Oct. 20, 2016. He was the seventh Japanese national to be sentenced to death and later executed in China since the normalization of bilateral relations between Japan and China.
