Judicial reform in China

IV.

Enhancing Judicial Capabilities

Improving judicial capabilities is an important goal of China's judicial reform. In recent years, China has continuously improved its qualification system for the legal profession, strengthened occupational and ethical training, and improved its funding guarantee, thus effectively improving judicial capabilities and laying a solid foundation for enhancing the public credibility of the judiciary.

Implementing a unified national judicial examination system. China has established and constantly improved its national judicial examination system by incorporating qualification examinations for junior judges, junior prosecutors, lawyers and notaries. The national judicial examination system for access to the legal profession plays an important role in regulating qualifications for legal personnel, improving the overall quality of judicial staff and promoting the professionalism of legal personnel. Since 2002, the national judicial examination has been held annually. Organized and implemented nationwide, it has evolved into a unified system for access to the legal profession. By the end of 2011, nearly 500,000 people had passed the national judicial examination and were qualified to work in the field of law.

Establishing a tiered law-enforcement qualification examination system for the police. To enhance the capabilities of its police officers, China requires all on-the-roster police officers in public security organs to take a qualification examination on law enforcement. Those who fail shall not be entitled to enforce the law. In 2011, the examination was taken by a total of 1.73 million police officers, of whom over 1.69 million passed.

Strengthening occupational training for judicial staff. To keep up with the times and meet the public's increasing demands on the judiciary, China pays increasing attention to improving the occupational training system for judicial staff and elevating their capabilities. The central and provincial-level judicial organs have now established training agencies, formulated training plans, and extended training for all judicial staff, while setting up various specific training systems, including required training for junior officials and officials prior to promotion. The training programs have changed the traditional mode that focused on higher academic degrees and theoretical knowledge, but selected judges, prosecutors and police officers who have rich practical experience and a relatively high level of theoretical knowledge to serve as teachers. This educational training is designed to tackle the key, difficult points and newly emerging conditions and problems, and constantly improve practicability. Over the past five years, China has trained some 1.5 million judges, 750,000 prosecutors and 6 million police officers.

Intensifying professional ethical training for judicial staff. In light of different features of their work, judicial organs have formulated basic work ethics, setting forth specific requirements for judicial staff in such aspects as moral values, conduct in performing duties, discipline, style and etiquette in work, and conduct off duty. In 2011, a campaign for spreading core values was launched among China's judicial staff, taking "loyalty, for the people, justice and incorruptibility" as the common values to be held by them.

Strengthening professional ethics training for lawyers. This training, which highlights "always following the law, observing good faith, working diligently, and ensuring justice," is being carried out to build up the professional ethics of lawyers. Attempts are made to consolidate the self-discipline of the lawyers association, to establish a credibility system for practicing lawyers, and to improve the mechanism for evaluating and supervising the credibility of practicing lawyers and for punishing dishonest practicing lawyers so as to spur lawyers to increase their sense of responsibility in safeguarding the lawful rights and interests of the recipients of their services, to guarantee proper enforcement of the law, and to uphold equity and justice and ultimately to improve the moral standards and credibility of lawyers.

(Chart 1. Composition of Lawyers in China, 2011)

Expanding space in which lawyers play their role. China has borrowed international experience in establishing the systems of public defenders and corporate lawyers. Since 2002, the country has trial-established the systems to provide legal counsel for government decision-making and major corporate operations, thus improving the structure of the law business that is composed of public defenders, corporate lawyers as well as lawyers in the common sense (including full-time and part-time ones). The Lawyers Law, revised in 2007, improves the organizational form of law firms, allowing individuals to open law firms. Thus, a setup of state-funded, partnership and individually owned law firms has been established. By the end of 2011, China had had 18,200 law firms, an increase of 31.6% compared with 2008. Among them, 13,500 were partnerships, 1,325 state-funded ones and 3,369 individually owned ones. There had been more than 210,000 lawyers, of whom full-time lawyers accounted for 89.6%, part-time ones made up 4.5%, while the rest were corporate lawyers, public defenders, legal-assistance lawyers and military lawyers. In 2011, China's lawyers acted as legal counselors for 392,000 clients, an increase of 24.6% compared with 2008; they handled 2.315 million litigation cases, 625,000 non-litigation cases and 845,000 legal-assistance cases, up by 17.7%, 17% and 54.5% respectively as compared with 2008.

(Chart 2. Cases Undertaken by Lawyers from 2008 to 2011)

Reforming the funding guarantee system for judicial organs. China initiated a new round of judicial reform in 2008, clearly proposing that a funding guarantee system for judicial organs will be established, featuring "funding by category, separate management of income and expenditure, and full-sum coverage." The central and provincial governments have increased their funding for judicial organs, ensuring full-sum coverage for the expenses of judicial organs at all levels, resulting in great improvement in the performance capacity of grassroots judicial organs. Litigation fees collected by judicial organs in accordance with the law and revenues from fines and confiscations are all turned over to the national treasury to ensure the separation between income and expenditure as well as between penalty decisions and penalty payments, so as to halt wanton collection of fees and fines that are driven by the hunger for economic gains. The state has also formulated standards for the construction of basic facilities and equipment for judicial organs to improve their working conditions and information and technological levels, providing concrete guarantees for enhancing judicial capabilities.