China Policy Blog
Regaining public trust in the legal system
 | New measures such as making court verdicts available to the public online are desperately needed to restore faith in the system, Yiyi LU, a research fellow at the China Policy Institute, writes in this blog post.* Sept 1, 2009 |
Recently, the executive vice president of China's Supreme Court, Shen Deyong, remarked that “the distrust of the legal system among some people is gradually spreading and developing into a general social attitude. This is an extremely scary phenomenon.” The spreading distrust of the legal system can be seen in the Hu Bin case.
In May, Hu Bin, a young man from a wealthy family, had hit and killed a pedestrian in Hangzhou while car-racing on a public road. After the case went to court in July, a rumour circulated on the internet that Hu’s family had bribed the law enforcement departments and hired a substitute to stand trial and serve his jail term so that Hu could escape punishment. Many believed the rumour. Although both the court and the procurators’ office in Hangzhou have confirmed the identity of Hu Bin, the rumour has persisted, as many netizens choose not to believe the statements of the Hangzhou judicial authorities.
Aware of the grim consequences of the crisis of confidence, the judiciary has taken measures to try to regain public trust. On 22 August this year, the People’s Daily carried a report about Henan province’s new judicial transparency programme. The programme started last year with the online posting of verdicts of the provincial high court in Henan on 30 December 2008. By the end of 2009, Henan is expected to make available online all court verdicts in the province.
Interestingly, the public has discovered many mistakes in the published verdicts. One verdict was found to contain 43 mistakes. Another verdict had declared a person who was alive to be deceased. Many lower courts in Henan have been very reluctant to publish their verdicts. Every intermediate court has made a self-assessment of the percentage of its verdicts which they believed wouldn’t stand public scrutiny. The lowest figure of 5.9% was made from the Xinxiang Intermediate Court, while the highest figure was a shocking 60.3%.
With such a high percentage of verdicts considered problematic even by the courts themselves, it is no wonder that the public does not have confidence in the legal system. The People’s Daily article says the decision to publish verdicts put Henan courts under huge pressure, but the pressure has proved effective in improving their work. The judiciary apparently understands the implications for political and social stability if the Chinese public no longer believes they can seek justice and protection through the legal system.
New measures such as publishing court verdicts are therefore desperately needed to restore faith in the system.
Post a comment
The China Policy Institute reserves the right to edit, moderate or reject any comment.* = Required information
