China’s Forensic Science Reform: Progress and Prospects

Abstract

China’s forensic reform in 2005 has made positive progress on the forensic system in many aspects. Apart from abolishing forensic sectors in courts, increasing such sectors funded by social bodies and improving the quality of forensic examination, there has been significant progress on infrastructure and equipment construction in practice. With investments from Party committees or governments, forensic agencies including those inside police and supported by social sectors have achieved desirable results in developing their capacity building in recent years. Nonetheless, the independence of forensic sectors that the 2005 reform did attempt to improve appears not to change much the situation of investigative bodies conducting forensic examination. In fact, the police control forensic work after investigation so as not to ensure impartiality of forensic results made by police forensic experts. Thus, China need to create independent scientific institutions for forensic research, analyses and free casework in future reform, in order to build support for an overhaul of forensic science. Regardless in a broad or narrow sense, meanwhile, the “independent” nature of forensic institutes never requires abolition of those inside police. But their independence from the three institutions including police is still at the core of further forensic science reform in China.