2011-02-26 17:48

The Eighth Amendment to the Criminal Law, approved Friday after three reviews by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, deserves everyone's attention because it involves one of our foremost problems: food safety.

The unsettling mixture of truth and falsity about the seriously contaminated food chain, mostly by unscrupulous businesspeople, has brewed among us very high expectations for the Criminal Law to provide more effective deterrence. The latest amendment represents a legislative response to those anticipations.

According to Article 144 of the current law, the minimum punishment for people who add non-food, toxic or harmful materials to food products or knowingly sell such food products is imprisonment for up to five years, or criminal detention, and a fine. The Eighth Amendment has removed criminal detention from the provision, meaning anyone convicted of such a crime, irrespective of the circumstances, will be imprisoned.

This is harsher than the present provision for punishment. But is it harsh enough? Obviously not, if we want criminal sentences to deter people from sabotaging our food safety.

Helpless about the pervasiveness and boldness of violators, ineffectiveness of the official watchdogs, and the weakness of the judiciary, many people tend to pin their last hope on penalties to deliver justice and act as deterrence. This is not a bad thing in itself.

But how harsh should our law be? A death sentence plus confiscation of property, the highest degree of punishment for the most heinous crimes, can be used in food contamination cases, too. Capital punishment, however, has been around for some time. Has it deterred people from endangering our food chain? If the fear of death cannot prevent them, what else can the law do?

Not that our law, the new amendment included, has been severe enough with people who poison our food. We believe the punishment for this crime can and should be substantially tougher. Considering the damage it has done to public health and the sense of insecurity it has instilled in society, there is sound moral and jurisprudential ground to prescribe penalties harsh enough to send shudders down perpetrators' spines.

But irrespective of how strict a law is, it will not bite until it is executed faithfully. Our troubles with poisonous food have a lot to do with a less-than-harsh law. But we should never ignore the plain truth of poorer-than-expected implementation.

Unscrupulous businesspeople keep polluting and poisoning our food because they see little chance of being caught and brought to justice. If that pattern persists, even the severest law alone cannot save us from predicament.