China’s judiciary needs reform: top judge

Beijing: As China grapples with the increasingly urgent quest to reform its judicial system and ensure a society that is governed by the rule of law, the country’s top judicial official admitted on Monday that a large gap remained between reality and goals.
The President of China’s Supreme People’s Court, Xiao Yang, in his annual report to the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s Parliament, on Monday was blunt in his assessment.
“We must also soberly understand that there remains quite a stark contradiction at present between people’s constantly growing demands on the judiciary and the abilities of the people’s courts,” he told the NPC.
Problems ranged from inefficiency in the courts and weak enforcement of verdicts, a lack of funding and personnel and corruption and abuses among a “small number of courts” according to Mr. Xiao.
In China, judges with professional training or academic backgrounds remain scarce. Only about one-fifth of all judges in the country, in fact, have law degrees. The first time a lawyer was appointed as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of China was in 2000.
Public demand
However, recent years have seen a strong public demand for legal reforms. Increased prosperity and looser socio-economic controls have brought in their wake a growing sense of legal entitlement in citizens, who are going to court in record numbers.
Developing the rule of law is thus one of the major planks of Beijing’s attempts at political reform.
The idea is that while multiparty democracy remains off the agenda, people are instead to be given a series of tactical legal rights, such as the right to sue government agencies on certain issues, to private property, religious freedom and so on.
In his speech, Mr. Xiao also referred to the reforms in China’s death penalty process that were put in place last year and gave the Supreme Court back its power of final approval over death penalties after a gap of more than two decades.
He said the reforms were “operating normally,” but gave no specifics on numbers of executions.
Death penalty figures are not available publicly in China, although the international rights group Amnesty International estimates the country executed at least 1,010 persons in 2006.
The Supreme Court President’s comments came only a few days after Chinese media publicised an interview with Huang Ermei, the president of the top court’s criminal law chamber, saying that 15 per cent of death sentences handed by lower courts in 2007 had been rejected by China’s Supreme Court due to “unclear facts, insufficient evidence, inappropriate determination of punishment and unlawful procedures.”
Mr. Xiao also revealed to the NPC that Chinese courts have dealt with 1.2 million cases of violent crime over the last five years, including murder, kidnapping and robbery, an over 10 per cent rise over the previous five-year period.
Strides in fighting graft
Following Mr. Xiao’s report, Jia Chunwang, China’s chief prosecutor made his presentation to Parliament in which he said his office had made strides in fighting official corruption and abuse of office.
In the 2003-2007 period, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate investigated 42,010 officials for abuse of office, he said, of which 16,060 were convicted.
Pallavi Aiyar
The Hindu; Tuesday, Mar 11, 2008