Abstract: Through a series of revisions, the Chinese Criminal Procedure Law has gradually improve the system of protection of citizens' property rights, transforming the system from one that takes personal rights as the center to one that pays equal attention to personal rights and property rights, and from one that emphasizes the protection of victims' property rights to one that takes into account the protection of victims and the property rights of accused persons as well as those of persons other than those involved. However, at present, some problems still exist in the application of compulsory measures against property, such as exceeding the prescribed scope, time period, and amount of seizure, destrain, and freezing of property, measures that are too easy to impose but too difficult to lift, arbitrary disposal of property, etc., which seriously infringe on the property rights of the accused. The root cause of these problems is that seizure, distrain, and freezing of property are defined as acts of investigation and evidence collection. On the one hand, evidence collection activities as investigation behavior show a strong administrative color, lacking the necessary judicial review and litigation structure; on the other hand, the evidence attribute of an object of investigation obscures its property attribute, inhibits the property rights embodied in the object and the defense right of the accused against public power derived from it. In this round of amendment of the Criminal Procedure Law, China should include seizure, destrain and freezing of property into the system of compulsory measures, build a mechanism for ex ante judicial review, in-process examination of the necessity of compulsory measures, and ex post correction and compensation, and improve the protection system of the accused's right to know, right to object, right to apply for the change of compulsory measures, and right to relief, as well as the relevant supporting and connection mechanisms.

Keywords: property-related compulsory measures; the accused; protection of property right; amendment to the Criminal Procedure Law

Author: Dong Kun, research fellow, CASS Institute of Law;

Source: 2 (2025) Tsinghua Law Journal.