SPC website to track defiant defendants

The Supreme People's Court is to build an online platform for people involved in civil trials to track the implementation of punishments handed out by courts, a top official said on Sunday.

The system, scheduled to launch in June, will record the outcome of every case heard nationwide and is aimed at improving transparency and ensuring defendants adhere with court orders, said Liu Guixiang, director of law enforcement for the SPC.

"It will help litigants monitor the implementation of a verdict, such as seeing that a defendent's property will be sold at auction or whether their savings have been frozen," he said. "It's also good for keeping judges in line, to avoid improper behavior."

He said the platform will be coupled with another financial system, also to be launched in June, that will allow authorities to lock the bank accounts of defendants who fail to comply with court orders more quickly. The system will work with financial institutions nationwide, including 4,000 banks.

"Finding these people and their savings is difficult in a country as large as China, so connecting the online platform with financial institutions is necessary to improve enforcement," Liu said, adding that the system will eventually be extended to authorities and companies related to real estate and vehicle registration.

Since launching a campaign to tackle the issue in December, the SPC has dealt with about 60,000 cases in which defendants have failed to comply with a court order, including several bosses who refused to pay their employees, said Wu Shaojun, deputy director of law enforcement for the top court.

So far, courts have managed to seize as much as 2 billion yuan ($304 million) for migrant workers whose salaries had been illegally withheld, he said.

The SPC has been releasing information to the public about defendants who fail to comply with court orders since 2013. To date, it has named and shamed more than 3.08 million people.

That year, the court also introduced restrictions on such offenders, such as placing a ban on them purchasing first-class tickets on high-speed trains as well as applying for a bank loan. Such moves have led to about 20 percent of those blacklisted carrying out a court judgment, Liu said.

Zhou Qiang, president of SPC, said on Saturday that a major task for Chinese courts this year is to solve the difficulty of implementing verdicts. "We'll strictly fight those unwilling to enforce verdicts and put more restrictions on offenders," he said.