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Justice must be done

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-03-11 07:48

In the past years, the annual performance reports of the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate have drawn the lowest approval ratings among the six work reports presented to the National People's Congress.

This year, we wait to find out how the deputies, who listened in great attention at the Great Hall of the People yesterday, vote for them.

From the texts of what the country's two top judicial officials delivered yesterday afternoon, one can find little to criticize. The reports were carefully worded, the formats followed the formula of featuring past-year achievements and new-year resolutions.

And both, acknowledging that their work in the previous year fell short of public expectations, pledged to apply stricter self-discipline.

The top court, for example, admitted to some instances of inefficiency, incapability, disregard for society and bribery.

Similarly, the top procuratorate conceded cases of abuse of power, lack of supervision and self-regulation, and corruption.

It is good to know they have seen the gap between their performance and our expectations, and want to improve. That is essential to repairing the judiciary's image, tarnished, most famously, in the case of duo mao mao, or hide-and -seek, a wildly popular new catchword on the Internet.

It refers to an inmate in a Yunnan judicial detention facility who was beaten to death by prison bullies. But local authorities announced he had died in an accident when playing duo mao mao. The truth did not emerge until higher authorities got involved amidst an online public uproar.

A senior official of the Supreme People's Procuratorate, conceding that prison bullies have been a problem for a long time, complained that the Yunnan incident had been sensationalized. He was right. But this is the reality in the Internet age - bad news can spread at the speed of a click and get blown out of all proportion.

We agree with the two top judicial organs that the quality of legal professionals leaves more to be desired; and that should not be a big issue given our highly productive institutions of higher learning.

But it is not as simple as hiring more people with law degrees; people are more concerned about whether the courts and the procuratorates are discharging their duties with commitment to justice - and not with the contents of the reports they hand in every year.

The judiciary must demonstrate with action that they deserve our fullest trust.

(China Daily 03/11/2009 page9)