China Passes New Safeguards for Criminal Suspects BEIJING - China's national legislature enacted new safeguards for criminal suspects and defendants on Wednesday, but upheld the right of the police to hold certain suspects in secret residential locations for up to six months, ignoring a last-minute online campaign by critics to curb police authority. Nearly 8 percent of the delegates abstained or voted against the legislation, an unusual display of disagreement within the hand-picked National People's Congress. The online effort to postpone the vote was blocked when censors erased their messages from an Internet microblogging site. Chen Guangzhong, a criminal procedure expert and adviser to the committee that drafted the amendments, said that the revised Criminal Procedure Law - last overhauled 15 years ago - provides greater protection for suspects subjected to residential confinement, including requiring the police to notify their relatives within 24 hours of their detention. But the police will still be allowed to hold suspects in their homes for up to six months. And the police can hold those suspected of threatening national security, terrorism or serious corruption outside their homes for the same length of time without disclosing the location or the reason to their families. "There are still shortcomings that need to be addressed in the future," Mr. Chen said. It's disputable that there's enough progress. But it's not disputable that there's tremendous progress. Human rights advocates, criminal defense lawyers and others argued that the police have used residential confinement to silence and punish a wide array of dissidents and government critics. They specifically object to confinement in secret, isolated settings, arguing that suspects are more easily abused and tortured. Chen Youxi, a Beijing criminal lawyer, said that residential detention "should only and always be at the suspect's own home." Chen Guangzhong, the adviser to the legislative committee, said that the law enforcement authorities insisted that residential detention was a necessary option because the police needed more time to investigate certain cases. The law allows suspects to be held in formal detention centers for no more than 37 days without formal arrest. He said he had contended that the police should be required to notify suspects" relatives of the location and reason for residential confinement because, otherwise, suspects would not be able to exercise their rights to defense lawyers. But law enforcement officials said the requirement was too burdensome. Among other changes, legal experts said, the revised law explicitly forbids the use of evidence extracted by torture, allows defense lawyers to attend police interrogations and requires that interrogations be videotaped if the penalty for the alleged crime is a prison sentence of 10 or more years. Xiong Wei, a Beijing researcher who studies the legislative process, said the last time the National People's Congress showed significant division was in 1992, over the plan for the Three Gorges Dam. Then, about a third of the delegates abstained or voted against the project. On Wednesday, of the 2,856 delegates, 160 voted against the Criminal Procedure Law revisions and 57 abstained. Mr. Xiong began an online campaign to delay the vote, arguing that the delegates were presented with the final legislation after the legal deadline. His posting Monday on Sina Weibo was forwarded 18,000 times, he said, before a worker for the company called him, apologetically explaining that it had been deleted as "too sensitive." The same thing happened to an online opinion survey posted Monday by Xue Manzi, an investor in Internet technologies, on whether the National People's Congress should vote on the residential confinement clause. It drew more than 10,000 responses, overwhelmingly negative, before it was blocked.