Senior official urges deepened judicial system reform

Senior Chinese leader Zhou Yongkang has urged consolidating and expanding the reform of the country's law enforcement system in order to better ensure justice for the people.

Zhou, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, made the remarks Monday at a meeting on judicial system reform.

At the meeting, officials with the Supreme People's Court, the Supreme People's Procuratorate, the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Justice delivered reports on establishing a case-oriented system, improving the monitoring mechanism over detention centers, regulating law enforcement activities and reforming the lawyer system, among other issues.

Zhou hailed the past reform for optimizing the power allocation among law enforcement organs, setting up a criminal system that combined leniency with severity and strengthening the management of law enforcement groups.

According to Zhou, the reform achieved the expected goals of "boosting the coherence and combat power" of political and legal teams as well as related departments' credibility.

Zhou stressed that the country's judicial work must give priority to the Party's cause, people's interests and the Constitution and laws, and it must stick to China's own situations while selectively borrowing experiences from other countries.

Zhou called for strengthened judicial democracy and openness to ensure people's rights to know, participate in and supervise the country's judicial cause.

While urging judicial organs to identify and resolve issues in their own work, Zhou noted that various reform measures must be implemented down to the grassroots level to boost the abilities of police to investigate cases, protect people's rights and ensure social stability and harmony.

In addition, Zhou called for more publicity efforts to spread the results of the judicial reform with facts and figures.