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| China's new vagrancy regulation comes into effect |
| CCTV.COM 2003-08-01 09:08:08 |
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China is stepping up efforts to safeguard the civil rights of both migrants and homeless people in urban areas. On Friday, a regulation that will provide voluntary shelter for vagrants and beggars goes into effect. The new measure comes more than a month after the Chinese central government abolished a 20－year－old regulation that allowed police to round up people without identification cards at will.
For China's migrant workers, the longed－for day has at last arrived. August 1st sees the end of the old regulation, under which it was not rare for poor rural migrants who had just set foot in a city to be sent home as so－called "sanwu people". The term "sanwu" in Chinese denotes people without legal documents of identification, normal residence or source of income.
With the function of maintaining social order being removed from the new regulation, discrimination against migrant workers is expected to stop.
Under the new regulation, police are not allowed to imprison migrants without identification cards as vagrants.
Instead, police have the duty to " inform beggars and vagrants that they can ask for help from shelters".
This underlies the voluntary basis of the new relief system rather than the so－called "holding system" previously in force.
The decision by the government to scrap the 20－year－old regulation last month followed the highly publicized death in police custody of Sun Zhigang, a 27－year－old graphic designer detained in the southern city of Guangzhou in March.
In response to Sun's death, legal scholars petitioned the National People's Congress, saying the rule infringed constitutional freedoms.
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Editor: Xiao Wei CCTV.com
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