The China project.

• Author: Duckett, Mona
• Position: Feature Report on Canadian Lawyers Abroad

I was thrilled to receive a call from the Canadian Bar Association's (CBA) International Development Committee in 2004 inviting me to join a group of lawyers travelling to China to teach interviewing techniques and advocacy skills to other lawyers. The CBA was and remains involved in a China Criminal Justice Reform and Advocacy Project (CJRAP), begun in 2003. It is a three-year project with the Criminal Law Committee of the All China Lawyers' Association. One of the mandates of the advocacy project is to provide professional skills training for criminal defence lawyers across China, whose numbers and responsibilities have changed dramatically in the last 10 years. In the late 1970s, there were no more than a couple of hundred practising lawyers in China, most trained during the '50s and '60s, having lost or changed their law-related jobs during the cultural revolution (1966-1976). By 2002, there were over 110,000 practising lawyers, still an inordinately low number per capita compared to North America.

Other goals of the project include helping the local lawyers' associations develop their own training programs to deliver professional skills training for lawyers, increasing their capacity to advocate for law reform, and assisting them in helping the public understand the legal system and the role of lawyers within it.

Prior to my flight, I armed myself with as much information as possible about the changing Chinese criminal justice system. Information was hard to come by, often conflicting, and sometimes dated. Major revisions to the Criminal Procedure Law of the People's Republic of China were enacted in 1996, yet many of the rights and protections we enjoy in Canada were not a part of it. It was difficult to determine how active lawyers were in the criminal justice process, and whether the procedures the law technically provided for were even occurring and with what regularity. Nonetheless, I went to China with a plan as to how these lawyers might deal with the challenges which I expected must face them.

The CJRAP attempts to reach as many lawyers as possible, particularly those who do not have access to what little continuing legal education there is and thus sends the lecturing Canadian lawyers to remote regions throughout the country. In 2004, I made two trips to China, travelling to four separate areas, including a very remote region south of Kazakhstan where there were only 2,000 lawyers for a population in excess of two million...