The termination of the death sentence would not only conform to the world trend but demonstrate the Chinese Government's resolve in safeguarding human rights, said Liu Hainian, a professor with the human rights research centre of the Chinese Society of Social Sciences.

He made the remark at a recent international seminar on capital punishment in Xiangtan, Hunan Province. The meeting was the first of its kind held in China.

Ma Changsheng, a professor at Xiangtan University, called for the abolition of the death penalty by 2020 when China has become a xiaokang (well-off) society.

The view was echoed by Chen Zhonglin, a professor with the University of Politics and Law of Southwest China.

China, as a signatory of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, should start from this basis and work to bring the country's domestic laws closer to the spirit of the covenant, which advocates an end to the death sentence, he said.

The annullment of the death sentence has never been a focus of much attention in China until now although it has remained a world topic for the past 200 years.

The perception that "a murderer should pay with his own life" or "life for life" is deeply ingrained in Chinese culture which believes in punitive justice.

Courts regularly execute heinous criminals as part of major campaigns to crack down on rising crimes and as a deterrent to potential criminals.

But experts at the meeting opined that the death sentence has not proved more effective in curbing crimes than life imprisonment, based on a UN report in 1988 on the relationship between capital punishment and murder rates.

A professor from Lithuania argued that crime rates in the country even dropped when the death sentence was annulled there in 1999.

Supporters of the death sentence have long held that putting a bullet in the back of a criminal's head is much less costly than keeping him behind bars all his life. But Xu Wenzong, a lawyer from Taiwan, rejected the idea. "Life is priceless. Its value cannot be measured in terms of money," he said.

And society as a whole should be held responsible to some extent for the background to crime. The negative environment where a would-be criminal is raised and poverty as a result of unfair distribution of wealth both provide the hotbed for crimes, he said.

More importantly, there will never be a chance to correct a mistake in a death sentence.

Hu Yunteng, a professor with the Supreme People's Court, writes in one of his books that among the death sentences submitted to his court for approval, more than 10 per cent of them were blocked.

Considering the fact that death sentence approval rights have been delegated to some provincial high people's courts, it is quite possible that capital punishment could be wrongly applied in some cases, he concluded.

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