The Standing Committee of the Ninth National People’s Congress (NPC), the nation’s top legislative body, passed the long-debated amendments to the Marriage Law on Saturday when it closed its 21st session.

The lawmakers also gave the green light to the Trust Law, amendments to the Law on the Management of Tax Revenue Collection and the Law on National Defence Education.

The amendments to the 20-year-old Marriage Law were adopted with a vote of 127 approvals, one objection and nine abstentions from national legislators.

One of the guiding principles behind revising the law was to protect the rights of women and children, according to Wang Shengming, a legislative official with the Legal Affairs Commission of the NPC Standing Committee.

Most of the 33 major changes to the law were made in favor of women and children.

The legislation bans domestic violence, outlaws bigamy and prohibits married people from cohabiting with anyone other than their spouses.

Women and children are widely considered to be most vulnerable in these circumstances.

Domestic violence occurs in three out of every 10 families and has been cited in three-fifths of the country’s divorce cases, according to figures from the All-China Women’s Federation.

Committing bigamy will now lead to criminal punishment ranging from detention to imprisonment for up to two years, according to the Criminal Code.

The keeping of concubines under the guise of secretaries and housekeepers has been rampant in a number of relatively developed provinces in the country in recent years.

Many people were also hoping that the criminal punishment of bigamy would be extended to disciplining concubinage under the new legislation. Others had proposed that the law take specific measures to curb the ever-spreading practice of adultery and extramarital affairs.

However, the final amendments to the Marriage Law have not adopted these suggestions.

Wang argued that it is not appropriate for the Marriage Law, a civil legislation, to administer criminal punishment.

“But the law can offer compensation to innocent parties in other ways,” he said.

The revised law says cohabitation with others rather than one’s spouse will lead to compensation to the betrayed spouse in divorce cases.

And the legislators agreed that Party and government discipline and moral standards will also play their roles in curbing such infamy.

The legislation has also incorporated judicial explanations proven to be effective in judging divorce cases.

To fill in loopholes in the legislation, the Supreme People’s Court is eligible to issue judicial explanations, as guidelines for courts at all levels when judging cases, according to the Law on Legislative Procedures.

Judges have relied heavily on judicial explanations when deciding whether a couple should break up or not in the past because stipulations in the old Marriage Law were too vague to be implemented.

The old legislation simply said that a couple could divorce if there was a fundamental incompatibility between them.

The new amendments reflect a collective wisdom instead of the sole views of legislators and legal professors.

(China Daily 04/30/2001 )