To those familiar with criminal justice in the PRC, the Ghosn case has always been of great interest. The long detention periods allowed the police and prosecution in democratic Japan as well as totalitarian China, of course, ring a bell. So do the restrictions on access to the detained suspect, although Japan does allow a role for defense counsel if the suspect can afford one. But lawyers are not allowed to be present when the suspect is interrogated, and interrogations go on endlessly in the hope of extracting confessions.
From the outset of the Ghosn case, I was also struck by the apparent coordination between the police/prosecution and major local business interests. This is a frequent phenomenon in China. As Hong Kong, Taiwan and ethnic Chinese business people from other jurisdictions have experienced, involvement in a commercial dispute in China with Chinese partners or rivals can result in detention by local Chinese police. Local Public Security Bureau officials sometimes travel to far flung places within the country to detain non-Mainlander businessmen who, fearful of returning to the locus of their business in China for negotiation of a dispute, have erroneously believed that negotiations could be conducted safely on “neutral” turf elsewhere in the country. Once detained, the “suspect” is told that any criminal charges can be made to disappear if he is only reasonable in settling the matter. Many police fail to realize that, even in a Chinese court, promises extracted under coercion should not be legally enforceable. Or at least they and the politically well-connected local business interests that have mobilized the aid of the police realize that these cases rarely reach the courts for one reason or other or that, if they do, the same political influence that mobilized the police can also guarantee judicial cooperation.