The task of trying Zhou Yongkang, the most senior mainland official yet to face graft charges, will fall to a court in Tianjin, where the corruption case of a former Shanghai party chief was heard.
The No 1 branch of Tianjin’s municipal procuratorate filed Zhou’s indictment in the Tianjin No 1 Intermediate People’s Court on Friday, Xinhua reported, without giving a date for the trial.
Analysts said Tianjin’s previous experience in handling sensitive court cases involving senior officials and its location might have been why authorities chose it.
“There are no clear rules regarding the selection of locations [to hear] this kind of case. Tianjin tried Chen Liangyu and some other major cases. Maybe [the authorities] have taken their experience in trying senior officials into consideration,” Peking University law professor He Weifang said.
Chen, the former party chief of Shanghai and a Politburo member, stood trial in Tianjin’s No 2 court in 2008. He was sentenced to 18 years in jail for taking bribes and abusing power. The same court also tried former Hubei governor Zhang Guoguang in 2004, who was jailed for 11 years for bribery.
Trying top officials outside the places where they took office or had connections has become a common judicial practice in the past decade. The unwritten rule is it is an attempt to minimise the interference that officials might exert over their trials.
