Respect law, experts urge foreigners

China's legal experts yesterday urged foreigners to respect Chinese law and advised Western media to refrain from politicizing the issue of capital punishment in the case of a Briton convicted for smuggling drugs into China.

The UK media quoted a British Foreign Office spokesperson as saying that the 53-year-old drug trafficker, Akmal Shaikh, would be executed today.

"It is not a question whether the Chinese government is lenient or not, it is about China's legal system," Huang Feng, a leading international criminal law professor at Beijing Normal University, said yesterday.