Prosecutors' drive strengthens respect of heroes, martyrs

Chinese prosecutors dealt with more than 8,000 administrative public-interest cases from 2018 to 2022 to urge government agencies to strengthen protection of memorial facilities for heroes and martyrs, an official from China's top procuratorate said on Friday.

Thanks to the case handling, more than 23,000 memorial sites have been renovated, according to Liu Dongbin, a prosecutor from the Supreme People's Procuratorate.

He said prosecutors nationwide also tackled nearly 100 public-interest cases in which individuals or departments damaged names, images, reputation and honor of heroes and martyrs during the same period, helping public enhance legal awareness to respect heroes and martyrs.

He disclosed the figures while introducing how prosecuting authorities implemented the Law on Protection of Heroes and Martyrs, which took effect on May 1, 2018, through initiating public-interest cases.

Under the law, activities that defame heroes and martyrs or distort and diminish their deeds are banned. Television and radio programs, videos, movies, publishers and the internet must not harm their names, images, reputation and honor.

In a case, for example, a man surnamed Qiu was prosecuted in Jiangsu province in 2021 for making posts online that distorted the heroic deeds of Chinese soldiers who died in a border clash with Indian troops in 2020.

Later, the man, who had more than 2.5 million followers on Sina Weibo, Chinese Twitter-like platform, was sentenced to eight months in prison for harming the reputations of heroes and martyrs as his posts had been forwarded over 200,000 times before he was ordered to remove them, which could be identified as great negative effect to the society.

Prosecutors can file lawsuits against poorly performing government departments or businesses in accordance with 2017 revisions to both the Administrative Procedure Law and the Civil Procedure Law.

The revisions initially covered cases in four categories - environmental protection, food and drug safety, State-asset preservation and land-rights transfers.

Since 2018, when the Law on Protection of Heroes and Martyrs came into effect, prosecutors have also been given the right to initiate such lawsuits in this regard.