Supreme Law: Put an end to the irregularity of impeding the public from attending the court trials in disguised forms and other non-standard judicial openness phenomena
The Supreme Law has required resolutely to stop irregular judicial openness phenomena such as prevent public court attendance in disguised form.
On December 26th, the Supreme People’s Court released the “Sixth Five-Year Reform Plan of the People’s Courts (2024-2028)” (hereinafter referred to as the “Plan”). Regarding how to deepen and regulate judicial openness, Si Yanli, deputy director of the Supreme Law Research Office, said that the court would continue to promote the standardization of judicial openness, effectively prevent the disclosure of privacy, personal information of parties involved, as well as commercial secrets that affect the legitimate rights of enterprises, and resolutely stop irregular phenomena such as preventing public attendance at trials in disguised form.
Si Yanli introduced that since this year, the Supreme Law has taken multiple measures to continuously deepen judicial openness, increase the efforts to publish judicial documents online, and the number of online documents has increased significantly compared with the previous period. The coverage of trial areas and case types is more diverse, which has effectively promoted fairness and justice to be more accessible, observable, and sensible.
Statistics show that from January to November this year, the total number of judicial documents newly published by the national courts on the China Judgment Online has reached more than 8.1 million, an increase of 67.3% over the same period last year. While the number has increased significantly, the “quality” of online documents has also continued to improve. For example, the number of newly published judicial documents by the Supreme Law and high-level courts is five times that of the same period last year, and the number of substantive trial judgments published by national courts has also increased significantly. The number of newly published judgments has increased by 99.8% year-on-year.
“Continuing to expand the scope of openness and emphasizing standardized and orderly disclosure. The purpose of continuously innovating forms of judicial openness is to provide more channels for social supervision, public learning of law, scholarly research, lawyer litigation, and judge case handling.” Si Yanli also gave examples such as establishing a normalized mechanism for publishing judicial trial data, publicly releasing major judicial statistical data every quarter; establishing and opening a case database for people’s courts to the public to effectively respond to people’s actual needs for deeper judicial openness; and building a “Fada Network” connecting courts at all levels and regularly publishing selected Q&A on the network, which has received widespread praise from all sectors of society.
Si Yanli expressed that the people’s courts will follow the reform requirements of the “Plan”, focus on improving working mechanisms for disclosing judicial information such as judgment documents, court trials, and trial procedures, formulate guiding documents for judicial openness, further improve working mechanisms for supervising and implementing judicial openness, tracking situations, analyzing and studying, regularly publish judicial data, and clarify the norms for providing judicial data to the outside world.
In addition, on the basis of continuing to deepen judicial openness, it is necessary to improve the protection mechanism for national data security, personal information of citizens, and legitimate rights of enterprises. We will also improve匿名化 rules for online documents and openness rules for court trials, and promote supervision against improper use of judicial openness information.
