Court to further open up, reduce wrong cases

China's top judicial authorities Monday emphasized the need for more openness at trials and vowed to improve the system to prevent miscarriages of justice at the country's annual legislative sessions.

Zhou Qiang, president of the Supreme People's Court (SPC) and Cao Jianming, president of the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) presented their work report for the past year and put forward plans at a National People's Congress (NPC) meeting on Monday.

Chinese courts acquitted 825 people for lack of evidence and reasonable doubt last year, Zhou said in the report. A series of wrong judgments that were corrected attracted much public attention in 2013, marked by the case of Li Huailiang, who was wrongly detained and jailed for over 12 years for the rape and murder of a teenage girl in Central China's Henan Province.

Judicial authorities instructed in August last year that all judges, prosecutors or police officers will be held liable in their lifetime for cases they have handled wrongly.

"In the past, wrong judgments were corrected only when the victim was found unharmed or the real murderer emerged. But there is big progress now as courts are acquitting wrongly charged people based on the lack of evidence," said Hong Daode, a professor with the China University of Political Science and Law.

Zhou's report said that about 45,000 trial proceedings were live broadcast on courts' official websites or microblogs, including several high-profile cases such as the trial of Bo Xilai, which was given a live text report on the top court's Sina Weibo.

The SPC opened a website to broadcast video and publish judgment documents. It also launched official accounts on Sina Weibo and WeChat, two of the country's leading social media tools.

"The efforts put into making court trials more open to the public are being strengthened to a degree greater than ever before," said Chen Zhonglin, dean of the Law School at Chongqing University. However, he noted that public participation in the court process is still lacking, and still far from what the public expects.

Hong agreed, saying that the SPC did not say to what extent local officials will be held responsible if they do not publish details of trials or there are malpractices, such as trial accounts differing from those of the live court trial.

Both experts said that the performance of the judiciary system in the past year has been improved compared with before, but they did not spot an overwhelmingly positive change in public attitude toward their performances.

Votes against the reports of the two bodies are relatively high among all reports submitted to the NPC for approval during the annual two sessions. A total of 605 deputies voted against the top court's report and 485 voted against the top prosecutors among 2,948 deputies in 2013.

Wang Wei, a deputy to the NPC who works in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times that deputies on the whole felt a low sense of satisfaction with the two bodies' performance in the past year. However this year, as the anti-corruption work strengthens, he sees some changes within the judicial systems on self-discipline. He noted that the verdicts in some big corruption cases allow the public to see that criminals receive the same punishments regardless of their ranking.