Road accidents compensation guidelines urged

Traffic and legal experts are calling on the government to regulate the compensation given to those who suffer mental anguish from traffic accidents.

In doing so, they say they are trying to better protect victims, provide judges with guidance and avoid unnecessary disputes.

An accident in Anshun, Guizhou province, on the expressway linking Shanghai and Kunming has left nine people dead. A total of 36 vehicles were involved in a series of pileups on a 1-kilometer stretch of the expressway as a result of heavy fog at about 9 am on Saturday. [Photo/China Daily]

Accident victims are increasingly asking for compensation for the mental anguish they often suffer. Such payouts are now made with few official guidelines and thus tend to vary greatly from place to place, according to experts speaking in the lead-up to World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims, which fell on Sunday.

In 2011, 62,387 people were killed in more than 210,000 road accidents in China, according to traffic authorities.

Of the 162 traffic accident cases heard from January to October in the Pingyin county people's court in Jinan, Shandong province, 131 were related to compensation for mental anguish, according to Li Mingjun, court enforcement officer.

A Hebei province man whose son's leg was fractured when he was hit by a car in July has been asking for compensation for the mental anguish the boy has suffered.

The 37-year-old man named Zhang said he is worried the injury will affect his 4-year-old son for the rest of his life.

"I'm handicapped, and I don't want my son to become like I am," he said. "After the crash, he'd cry all of the time and had difficulty expressing himself."

"I heard from my friends about how you can get compensation for mental anguish and I tried to learn more about that after my son was injured. I even talked to a lawyer about it, and then I asked for the compensation.

"My son must have been traumatized by the accident, so I think he deserves to be compensated."

Zhang Hui, 40, a driver in Beijing, finds himself in a similar situation, although the compensation he is struggling to obtain is for the mental anguish he himself has suffered since being in a crash in August.

"I know that this sort of compensation can be obtained under the current laws, so I applied," he said. "I was not only injured physically, but also mentally."

Zhang Zhuting, a professor specializing in traffic laws with the Management College of the Ministry of Transport, said the law does not contain many details about compensation for mental anguish.