The country's highest prosecution body, the Supreme People's Procuratorate, issued the new regulations which for the first time specify that extracting confessions through torture, collecting evidence by violent means and abusing detainees was against regulations, Xinhua news agency said.

They also define what could be considered torture -- beating, binding, freezing, starving, exposing suspects to severe weather, severely injuring suspects, and directly or indirectly ordering others to use torture.

Previous regulations only prohibited law enforcement and judicial officers from using "brutal means" to extract confessions without explaining what that meant, Xinhua said.

Torture was also defined by whether it caused "serious results," Xinhua said, which had also not been previously spelled out.

In March following a visit to China, Manfred Nowak, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, lamented the widespread use of torture and blamed it on the confession-oriented judicial system.

The system has produced startling miscarriages of justice, including the jailing of She Xianglin, who was tortured into confessing that he had murdered his wife in the early 1990s

He was freed last year after his wife resurfaced. She had fled her home and married another man.

Another case that shocked the nation involved Sun Zhigang, a man detained for not having proper identification in southern China's Guangdong province, who was later beaten to death by other inmates in a police detention center on orders from the guards.

Virtually unfettered police brutality has long been cited by international human rights groups as a core area of abuse in China.

The regulations Wednesday also outline other offences which constitute abuse of office, including illegally issuing logging and tree-felling permits and selling land-use rights below value.

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