HONG KONG — The Chinese Communist Party has demanded an end to arrest and conviction goals for the police, prosecutors and courts, state-run news media said Wednesday.

The order to end secretive performance standards was part of the government’s efforts to reduce the pressure for guilty verdicts. The pressure has led to a nearly 100 percent rate of convictions in criminal trials — and with that miscarriages of justice that have been exposed by a string of overturned convictions, including one in which the defendant was executed for murder.

“These cases include some that were shaped by a presumption of guilt,” said a report from Xinhua, the main state news agency. “There has been a stress on confessions, giving less weight to evidence, and even the use of torture to secure confessions.”

At a meeting on Tuesday, the Political and Legal Affairs Committee of the Communist Party, which oversees the police, prosecutors and judges, demanded that officials “firmly abolish unreasonable assessment goals for numbers of criminal detentions, arrest rates, indictment rates, and rates of guilty verdicts and case conclusions,” Xinhua said.