National People's Congress Standing Committee Enacts Law on Passports

The National People's Congress Standing Committee enacted the Law on Passports (Law) on April 29. It replaces the 1980 Regulations on Passports and Visas (Regulations) and will become effective on January 1, 2007.

The Law provides clearer rules than the previous Regulations about the conditions under which Chinese authorities may refuse to issue citizens a passport. Article 13 provides that the government may deny a passport application if the applicant is not a Chinese citizen, cannot prove his or her identification, commits fraud in the application process, is currently serving a prison sentence, is subject to a court order not to leave the country as a result of a pending civil case, or is a suspect or defendant in a criminal case. In addition, Article 13 says that Chinese authorities may deny passport applications if State Council ministries determine that the applicants' activities would harm national security or state interests. Official discretion to deny passports is more restricted under the language of the new Law than under that of Article 4 of the 1980 Regulations, which provides that authorities have blanket authority to deny passport applications. Article 20 of the Law provides that passport officials who fail to issue passports according to the above standards should receive disciplinary or legal sanctions.

Chinese officials deny passports to Chinese citizens living abroad who express views critical of the government, preventing them from returning to China and contravening international human rights standards. Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (which the Chinese government has signed but not ratified) provides both that "[e]veryone shall be free to leave any country, including his own" and that "[n]o one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country." But Chinese citizens who are Falun Gong practitioners in the United States, Italy, and Ireland have reported that consular officials denied their requests to renew their passports to return to China. Practitioners have alleged that consular officials demanded that they renounce Falun Gong as a condition for processing their passport renewals, and cited their refusal to do so as a reason for preventing their return to China. Throughout the 1990s, Chinese consular officials in the United States refused to issue a passport to Yang Jianli, a democracy activist, thereby barring him from returning to China legally. Yang is currently serving a five-year prison sentence in China in part for having entered the country on another person's passport. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has found that Yang’s detention was arbitrary. For more information on Yang Jianli's criminal case, see the CECC's analyses in October 2004, December 2004, and January 2005, along with case information searchable through the Commission's Political Prisoner Database.