President Xi Jinping has called on Chinese political and legal organs to demonstrate justice and fairness to the people in every judicial case, a goal the court system has always been earnestly pursuing.

In the past year, in keeping with the principle of serving the people and upholding judicial fairness, Chinese courts at various levels have worked hard to solve deep-rooted problems that may affect judicial fairness and restrict judicial capacity. These efforts have contributed to enhanced judicial credibility and justice and fairness for people before the courts.

Making progress in judicial openness

On December 15, the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) launched english.court.gov.cn, the English version of its official website, as well as a new version of China Judgments Online (www.court.gov.cn/zgcpwsw/).

The opening of the English-version site was a major step in increasing judicial transparency. SPC President Zhou Qiang expressed hopes that the website will tell China’s legal stories, offer China’s voice in the legal field to the world, respond to the international community’s concerns about China’s law and judicial development and enable the outside world to get a better understanding of China’s judicial system.

The new China Judgments Online provides users with browsing and download services for judgment documents in the Mongolian, Tibetan, Uygur, Korean and Kazakh languages so as to better meet diversified needs of the general public and professional users.

In 2015, the SPC took a series of measures to promote judicial openness, including:

February 27 – The app China Court Mobile TV was launched, informing users of important court news and major trials. Four months later, the number of users exceeded 500,000;

March 10 – The SPC issued a white paper on judicial transparency, the first of its kind in the top court’s history;

December 30 – The SPC officially launched an online service platform for lawyers, another channel to increase judicial transparency.

New case-filing system to ensure people’s litigation rights

On April 1, 2015, the 11th meeting of the central leading group for deepening overall reform passed a resolution concerning replacing the existing case review and filing system with the case registration and filing system.

The new rule was issued by the SPC on April 15 and took effect on May 1.

On May 4, the first workday after the new case-filing system came into force, Zhou supervised implementation of the new rule through videoconferencing. “It is a historic day,” said the SPC president, urging courts across the country to safeguard people’s litigation rights.

A month later, the number of cases accepted for registration by Chinese courts rose by nearly 30 percent, and 90 percent of the cases were filed immediately without problems.

Several lawyers regarded the case registration and filing system as “the most thorough and effective reform in the history of people’s courts”.

In 2015, the SPC continued to enhance protection of human rights through judicial procedures and improved the mechanisms for preventing, re-examining and correcting wrongful convictions.

On January 30, SPC Vice-President Jing Hanchao presided over a seminar, at which renowned legal experts made suggestions on how to discover and correct wrongful convictions.

While reviewing the work reports of the SPC and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate on March 12, Zhou Junjun, a deputy to the National People's Congress, China’s top legislature, said the judicial organ’s determination to correct wrongful convictions won great favor from the public.

“Justice may come late but will never be absent.” Chinese courts are doing their best to make the country free of wrongful convictions.