Improving environment

Enhancing public awareness of legal issues and getting authorities up to speed with the changes will help the rollout of the latest judicial reform, an official of the Supreme People's Court said.

The moves to push for the judicial reform, raised by the central government in November, have been viewed as providing a clear direction for Chinese courts to explore legal areas such as building intellectual property tribunals and hearing environmental cases beyond the administrative regions where such cases occur.

Tribunals for hearing intellectual property disputes have already been set up in Beijing and Shanghai as well as Guangdong province to help improve the professionalism of the legal sector, according to the five-year plan (2014-2018) of Chinese courts.

But the reform should be carried out in an improved legal environment where people can better understand judges' work and how they resolve legal disputes, said He Xiaorong, director of the judicial reform office with the top court.

If a dispute is being dragged down by nonlegal issues such as unreasonable petitions, it will be difficult for the reform to move forward, he said.

"It's not only necessary to improve a judge's ability to hear a case, it's also crucial for the public to develop a sense of judicial and legal issues," he said.

Other agencies and judicial organs such as the finance department handling judges' earnings as well as the human resources department should also be involved in the reform, he said.

"These joint efforts can help accelerate the reform and its enforcement, and allow judges to handle their trial work better," he said.