Map of Chinese courts goes online

Chinese courts will further push forward judicial transparency, in an attempt to make it more convenient for residents to search court information, spokesman of China's top court said on Thursday, when a court system map was put online.

Since Tuesday, also the country's first Constitution Day, residents can find out basic information of 3,496 Chinese courts, including names, addresses and phone numbers, on the Baidu Map, made by the Chinese largest searching engine.

"It means all the Chinese courts, expect military ones, can be found in yellow on the blue map when users search on the Internet,"said Sun Jungong, the spokesman of the Supreme People's Court.

This is the first step and it took the top court about 30 days to collect, integrate and put the basic information of these local courts, Sun said, adding that the map will be timely updated in their future work.

"We should let residents seek a court where they want to go on this map at the first time, telling them how and when the court was established and who the court's president is. It aims to make them easily know the appealing procedure online and reduce their lawsuit burden,"he said.

The top court will improve the map by adding more information, such as what big or influential cases a court hears, helping residents better understand Chinese courts and their work, according to him.

The information of Beijing Intellectual Property Court, the first IP tribunal built at the beginning of November, has been also provided on the map, he added.

It is not the first time that Chinese courts have made their work transparent via the Internet.

In November 2013, the top court opened its official micro-blogging account on Sina Weibo, Chinese Twitter-like platform. So far, it has posted more than 3,000 micro blogs and attracted almost 9.4 million followers.

By Nov 10, there have been 3,636 court micro-blogging accounts on the platform, or more than 90 percent of Chinese courts have voiced and interacted with the public via the service, according to statistics provided by Sina.

Cao Zenghui, an employee responsible for the platform, said that the number of court micro-blogging accounts has been rising rapidly, adding that the top five are the courts in Henan, Sichuan, Shandong and Hebei provinces and Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.

"In addition, putting trials via the micro-blogging accounts has become regular in our country,"he added.