(7) The Committee welcomes the accession of China to: (a) The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, in 2001; (b) The Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography, in 2002; and (c) The Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, in 2008. (8) The Committee also notes with interest that China has invited and received a visit from the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, which was made in November-December 2005. The Committee further notes that the Government of China has also received the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention twice. (9) The Committee notes the statement by Wang Zhenchuan, the Deputy Procurator-General of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate in November 2006 that “nearly every wrongful verdict in recent years … involved … illegal interrogation”. In this regard, the Committee notes with interest the Special Rapporteur on the question of torture’s observation that “the growing willingness of officials and scholars to acknowledge China’s torture problem is a significant step forward”. Efforts beginning with the publication of The Crime of Tortured Confession in the late 1990s have acknowledged the torture problem, inter alia by addressing wrongful convictions, weak investigations, lack of professionalism in the police, and confessions extorted by torture, and by the resumption by the Supreme People’s Court of its authority to review all death penalty cases (see E/CN.4/2006/6/Add.6, paras. 46-51). (10) The Committee also welcomes the efforts made by non-governmental organizations, national and international, to provide it with relevant reports and information, and encourages the State party to strengthen further its cooperation with them with regard to the implementation of the provisions of the Convention. C. Subjects of concern and recommendations Widespread torture and ill-treatment and insufficient safeguards during detention (11) Notwithstanding the State party’s efforts to address the practice of torture and related problems in the criminal justice system, the Committee remains deeply concerned about the continued allegations, corroborated by numerous Chinese legal sources, of routine and widespread use of torture and ill-treatment of suspects in police custody, especially to extract confessions or information to be used in criminal proceedings. Furthermore, the Committee notes with concern the lack of legal safeguards for detainees, including: (a) Failure to bring detainees promptly before a judge, thus keeping them in prolonged police detention without charge for up to 37 days or in some cases for longer periods; (b) detention; Absence of systematic registration of all detainees and failure to keep records of all periods of pretrial (c) Restricted access to lawyers and independent doctors and failure to notify detainees of their rights at the time of detention, including their rights to contact family members; (d) Continued reliance on confessions as a common form of evidence for prosecution, thus creating conditions that may facilitate the use of torture and ill-treatment of suspects, as in the case of Yang Chunlin. Furthermore, while the Committee appreciates that the Supreme Court has issued several decisions to prevent the use of confessions obtained under torture as evidence before the courts, Chinese Criminal procedure law still does not contain an explicit prohibition of such practice, as required by article 15 of the Convention; (e) and 15). 18 The lack of an effective independent monitoring mechanism on the situation of detainees (arts. 2, 11