China has accelerated efforts to build a just, highly effective and authoritative socialist judicial system and made great strides, including significant improvements in the credibility of law enforcement and the judiciary, over the past decade since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 2012, according to the Commission for Political and Legal Affairs of the CPC Central Committee on Friday.     

At a conference elaborating China’s reform of political and legal system in the past ten years, Jing Hanchao, an official from the committee said that re-allocating power and improving mechanisms have significantly improved China’s judicial credibility. For example, the political and legal system has categorized employee from the procuratorate into three categories – judge procurator, auxiliary judicial officer and judicial executive, with each role shouldering different and separate responsibilities. 

Jing further explained that the litigation system has also been improved and realized higher level of fairness and efficiency, pointing to the digital court, which enabled people to conduct all legal procedures online, such as filing a case, pay the litigation fee, attending court and so forth. China has become a frontrunner in terms of internet court, and has gained recognition from many peers internationally, said Jing. 

China has also rolled out a range of measures to improve judiciary services for the public by simplifying procedures for citizens. There are also laws established to help impoverished people with filing cases. Jing said that the people’s court had provided a total of 2.95 billion yuan ($460 million) in legal aid. 

Accelerated efforts to build of a just, effective and authoritative socialist legal system over the past decade has laid a solid foundation for a new chapter for the governance of China, said Jing. 

Shen Liang, an official from the Supreme People’s Court, said that the openness of China’s judicial system is also at the forefront of global standards.



Improving the transparency of China’s legal system is an important part in the country’s legal reform, said Shen, adding that the people’s courts set up websites to publish the process of trial, ruling documents and other information and used other means, including press conferences, to inform the public about judicial matters.  

China Judgement Online, a website where more than 130 million legal documents have been uploaded, was viewed more than 84 billion times as of Friday, according to Shen. He said that China will continue efforts to further improve the transparency of the judicial system going forward.
 
Global Times