I recently visited the Supreme People’s Court’s (SPC’s) new intellectual property court (SPCIPC) (intellectual property tribunal), currently sharing a building with the Beijing Internet Court, in the Fengtai district of Beijing.  But I will leave comments on the court’s operations to Mark Cohen and other intellectual property lawyers.   From the list of SPCIPC judges in Mark’s recent blogpost, it is clear that many of them have been borrowed from the lower courts.  The blogpost includes the line “..due to the rapid establishment and staffing of this new Court, many of the judges are likely on detail from their prior jobs to the new Court, pending permanent transfer.” It is unclear whether these judges will in fact be permanently transferred to the SPC, or in fact would prefer to do so. This blogpost will shed a bit of light on the phenomenon of the SPC borrowing/temporarily detailing 借调（jiediao)  staff from the lower courts.

As with the guazhi system in the SPC described in one of last year’s blogpost, it is one of the many aspects of the personnel system of the Chinese Party/state system that shapes how the Chinese courts operate.  Under this system, a person from a lower level institution is “borrowed” to assist with work at a higher level institution.  The borrowed person’s employment relationship remains with the lower level institution.  It appears to be a practical solution to the restrictions on SPC permanent headcount imposed by the Central Staff Commission, while being able to field sufficient personnel for the new institutions such as the Intellectual Property Tribunal and Circuit Courts.  Senior judges, such as division heads and vice presidents, have many administrative obligations and less time to hear cases. It is unclear how many borrowed staff the SPC has. Some knowledgeable persons suggest that they can be found in almost every operational department of the SPC.

In my experience, the circuit courts have borrowed judges from the lower courts to serve as judge’s assistants (法官助理).  While it is an imposition for judges to be away from their homes and family, it also an opportunity for them to make themselves known to SPC judges, a connection that may be useful in their later careers, whether or not they remain in the judiciary.

He Fan, head of the planning section of  the SPC’s judicial reform office, wrote about borrowed staff in a 2015 article on his Wechat account:

For lower court judges, being seconded to the higher court to help out is a mixed event. It means that you reach a higher level of experience, broaden your horizons, increase your knowledge, and your chances of being selected by a higher court will increase.  On the other hand, it means being away from loved ones, living for others, … sometimes the opportunity for the promotion in the original court is delayed, the superior court  may not extend an olive branch, and finally only it is only in exchange for a letter of praise from the higher court.

Generally speaking, the lower-level judges are seconded to the higher courts for three reasons. First, as an assistant judge, they are incorporated into the collegial panel to handle cases; second, as a judge’s assistant, assisting the judges of the higher courts in handling the case, such as the assistants of judges in the first and second Circuit Courts of the Supreme People’s Court, who are mostly excellent candidates from the lower courts. The third is to work in the “comprehensive” (supporting) departments, to work in the higher court’s research office, the audit office, the judicial reform and other departments engaged in judicial policy research, drafting judicial rules, etc.

In all legal arrangements, the devil is in the details.  Important details concerning how the Hong Kong and mainland legal systems interact are found in a series of arrangements on mutual legal assistance between mainland China and Hong Kong.  An “arrangement,” for those not familiar with Hong Kong/mainland legal jargon, is a quasi-treaty document between Hong Kong and the mainland. The mainland is looking to conclude further arrangements, including in the area of criminal law.  According to 29 June report by Xinhua News:

Chinese mainland and Hong Kong are expected to confirm further judicial assistance arrangements, including those regarding criminal proceedings.

Shen [Deyong, Supreme People’s Court (SPC) executive vice president] said in an interview with Xinhua that the two sides will carry out further negotiations on judicial assistance in civil and commercial cases and will take effective measures to deal with the assistance issues in criminal cases, so the assistance arrangements cover all judicial realms between the two sides.

It appears that Justice Shen is repeating what he told Hong Kong’s Secretary of Justice Rimsky Yuen in April, 2017.

Justice Shen’s language can be traced back to the 4th Plenum Decision:

Strengthen law enforcement and judicial cooperation between the mainland, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan,jointly attack crossborder unlawful and criminal activities.

(I discussed this in a January, 2015 conference at the University of Hong Kong.)

Likely taking the lead in negotiating these arrangements is the Hong Kong Department of Justice (Hong Kong DOJ)’s International Law Division (and I assume others as well) and its mainland interlocutors.  I assume that a team from the Supreme People’s Court (SPC)’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs office is among the negotiators on the other side of the table (with a team from the Supreme People’s Procuratorate involved with negotiations on criminal matters.  The Hong Kong DOJ’s website lists five mutual legal assistance arrangements, with the most recent one, signed on 20 June 2017, on the Reciprocal Recognition and Enforcement of Civil Judgments in Matrimonial and Family Cases, not yet in force.  The paper that the Hong Kong DOJ filed with the Legislative Council sets out details of the arrangement, including its scope.

This latest arrangement relates to one of many pressing practical legal issues between Hong Kong and the mainland, the large percentage of “cross-boundary marriages.” According to the Hong Kong DOJ’s consultation paper on the arrangement (the SPC did not issue a similar paper), cross-boundary marriages increased from 32% to 37% during 2009-2014 and 20-30% of divorce cases filed in Hong Kong’s family court during 2010-14 related to marriages that took place on the mainland.

This arrangement involved creative lawyering on both sides, because it involves incorporating principles from several Hague Convention to which mainland China is not a party:

• Recognition of Divorces and Legal Separations (1970), applicable to Hong Kong, but not the mainland;
• The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction (1980), applicable to Hong Kong, but not the mainland;
• International Recovery of Child Support and Other Forms of Family Maintenance (2007), not applicable to either Hong Kong or the mainland.

Many of the previous arrangements reflected Hague Conventions to which the mainland was already a party.

Commercial lawyers should note that according to an April, 2017 statement by Hong Kong’s Secretary of Justice Rimsky Yuen, it was agreed in the form of 2016 meeting minutes to prioritize an arrangement for reciprocal judgment enforcement in civil and commercial matters involving situations other than the presence of choice of court agreements.  A consultation paper has not yet been issued for that arrangement. I surmise that the arrangement will reflect the draft Hague Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments.  Hong Kong’s DOJ has at least one representative participating in China’s delegation.  Several senior SPC judges are also on the delegation. (The other two arrangements mentioned have already been concluded.)  It can be seen from this visual from a Chinese court’s Wechat public account, that the end of 2017 has been set as the deadline for concluding that arrangement.

Arrangements involving criminal matters are much more difficult to conclude, although several prominent commentators in Hong Kong this year have called for a rendition arrangement to be concluded. Among those include Grenville Cross, former director of public prosecutions in Hong Kong and Regina Ip, former Secretary for Security.  The issues have been discussed since the late 1990’s.  This 2005 paper submitted to the Legislative Council sets out some of the basic principles that could go into a future rendition arrangements:

• double criminality;
• issue of death penalty;
• non-extradition for political offenses;
• fair trial;
• double jeopardy;
• habeus corpus.

There have been academic articles on many of these topics.

It appears that the increased pressure on Hong Kong relating to the rendition arrangement is related to the drafting by the mainland’s Ministry of Justice of an International Criminal Justice Assistance Law.  (No drafts have yet been released.) Fellow blogger NPC Observer notes that although the law is intended as a comprehensive statute covering all areas of international criminal justice assistance, including the mutual recognition and enforcement of criminal judgments, official discourse labels it an anti-corruption law, likely designed specifically to hunt fugitive corrupt officials overseas.  So it appears also to be linked to Operation Skynet and the Central Anti-Corruption Coordination Group.

The status of negotiations on a rendition arrangement or other arrangements related to criminal justice are unknown.  What is known is that there have been instances, including earlier this year, in which certain mainland authorities have dispensed with the niceties of official liaison. Would having an arrangement improve matters, as Grenville Cross argues, or will “extraordinary” rendition continue to occur?

It appears that upholding an important part of Hong Kong’s rule of law, as evidenced by arrangements between Hong Kong and the mainland depends on the professionalism of Rimsky Yuen, the Secretary of Justice, his Department of Justice colleagues and their mainland interlocutors.  As he told Justice Shen and others at a meeting between the SPC and Department of Justice in April, 2017:

Cooperation [on criminal cases] is significant, but considering the difference of the two legal systems, we face challenges in civil, commercial and criminal ­cooperation. It will still take some time.

Finally, paraphrasing the Guardian, analyzing the Supreme People’s Court takes time and costs money. If you like the Monitor, please make a contribution (details here.)

In recent months, the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) has been issuing one policy document after another to put some substance into the vague language of a “trial-centered” criminal justice system.  One of those documents, which the SPC issued recently along with the Supreme People’s Procuratorate and Ministry of Justice, is directed at involving lawyers in the criminal case petitioning system: Opinions on Gradually Implementing Systems For Lawyers’ Representation in Collateral Appeals (Collateral Appeals Opinion).  （The document was copied to a surprising number of Party, state, and military institutions, according to this version).

The Collateral Appeals Opinion builds on a single line in item #36 of the SPC’s 4th Court Reform Plan outline:  “Promote the establishment of a system for lawyer representation in complaint appeals [collateral appeals] cases.”  As some readers may be aware, China has a collateral appeals or criminal case petitioning (刑事申诉) system, giving a convicted person and his or her family a right to petition a court to have the case re-opened and reconsidered under the Criminal Procedure Law’s trial supervision procedures.  Criminal defense lawyers are hopeful that this will lead to more involvement by the criminal defense bar, but there are many procedural and financial arrangements still to be worked out.

It seems likely that Judge Hu Yunteng, as a member of the SPC’s judicial committee (as well as others) were involved in the drafting of this policy document. As I discussed in a February, 2017, blogpost, Judge Hu Yunteng and other colleagues on the #2 Circuit Court wrote a research report analyzing criminal collateral appeals petitioners visiting the #2 Circuit Court (第二巡回法庭刑事申诉来访情况分析报告), (which does not seem to have been made public) and in the article summarized in that blogpost, advocated hearing the views of the party’s lawyer if one has been appointed and noted that making contact with the party and his lawyer was an important way to deal with these cases.

But establishing an effective collateral appeal system system involves further issues, as highlighted by one of my students in his class paper (edited).

1. Criminal petitioning [collateral appeal] lawyers face a dilemma: they don’t have the right to investigate evidence, read case files, or even meet their clients if their clients are now prisoners and not defendants. [Comment–section 9 of the Collateral Appeals Opinion has broad language on improving this–this is a positive step, but will require more specific implementing procedures].
2. Article 306 of the Chinese Criminal Law, which provides that criminal defense lawyers who encourage defendants or witnesses to change their testimony should be punished criminally. This  provision makes criminal defense lawyers extremely unwilling to investigate new evidence by themselves because of the high risk.
3. According to Chinese Criminal Procedure Law, the petitioning process should be conducted in the court which makes the original judgment. [Comment–the Supreme Peoples Procuratorate and Court media outlets recently have published proposals to have these cases should be considered by procuratorates and courts in other jurisdictions.] However, this court will have strong incentive to have these cases not successfully petitioned because their bonus and assessment are based on correctness rate of effective judgments. [My comment–this is one of the many ways the judicial performance assessment system creates obstacles to justice. So to make this reform effective, this indicator must be abolished.] Combined with the fact that there is no clear rule that needy petitioners should be assigned lawyers, they may either ignore the need for lawyers, or just assign lawyers who have little interest to really petition for their clients in these cases. So in most cases in which petitioners are in poverty, they could only seek the help of private lawyers for free service.
4. In China there is a saying that if you want to win in petitioning you have to make a big influence to make the government notice your case, and if you want the government to notice on you, you have to use some extreme rather than some “legal” ways to petition. If petitioners hire a lawyer, the lawyer has his/her own professional responsibility standard that he or she has to follow, which may sometimes conflict with the “best interest” of the client.
5. There a gap between the economic difficulty for ordinary daily life and economic difficulty in seeking legal service. For example, a person may not meet the criteria of economic difficulty because he or she’s earning is above the living standard. However, this person can still not able to afford legal service from a law firm because ordinarily the cost for seeking criminal defense service is above a person’s salary in a whole year. Such gap and seemingly objective standard actually causes a problem and means many people in need cannot receive the aid.

Chinese criminal justice reform–as President Trump says “it’s complicated!”

https://www.hbogoasia.hk/

Annually thousands of petitioners visit China’s courts, particularly the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) and its two circuit courts, to seek relief from injustices in the lower courts (and sometimes other injustices).

The #2 Circuit Court, located in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, has as one of its goals improving the way the courts in China’s northeast deal with cases in which ordinary people challenge government action, under the Administrative Litigation Law.  (Additionally, it hears a range of civil cases, as well.) The court is doing that through issuing a set of documents (to be analyzed in a future blogpost) and a research report.  (For those not familiar with what the SPC does, when the SPC looks into an issue, it often designates a research team to visit lower courts and review some of their files.) The chief judge of the #2 Circuit Court, Judge Hu Yunteng, and two colleagues looked into the question of why so many petitioners in Shenyang have grievances about administrative litigation in the lower courts.

According to the study, one-quarter of the 5000 petitioners whose visit was registered by the court in the first 11 months of 2015 complained about injustice in administrative cases, while those cases constituted only 2% of the overall caseload of the three northeastern provinces. According the study, most of the petitioners who visited the court were not registered.  From other statistics, a total of 33.000 visitors petitioned the court. In 2015, the #2 Circuit Court heard almost 200 administrative cases (accepted 193, closed 189, while in 2016, it accepted 691 administrative cases and closed 687). Who are these petitioners in these cases, why are they petitioning, and what should be done about it?

Who are the petitioners?

• The petitioners are mostly older, uneducated men from Liaoning Province. The demographics:
• 47%  are over 60, with 33% between the ages of 50 and 60;
• 64% are men, 80% from Liaoning, with the remaining 20% from Jilin and Heilongjiang;
• Most are from the countryside or unemployed, with very few represented by lawyers.

They often come repeatedly and in groups. They come in groups because of a group grievance, often relating back years and sometimes several decades. Why Liaoning? The court’s location in Shenyang means that it is more accessible to them, the province is more populous and has historically had more administrative cases. The peak of petitioning was in March, 2015 and is now has stabilized at a lower number.

Their grievances

The grievances are what the SPC (and the Communist Party) entitle “people’s livelihood,”–cases challenging government land requisition and compensation demolition of real property; administrative inaction, and release government information. Of those, 66% are related to land requisition, generally when the government requisitions land in old city and shantytowns.  The core reason, according to the judges’ analysis, is local government failure to comply with the law in the process, causing all sorts of administrative litigation and large numbers of petitioners.

Another reason for petitioning is that the rationale in court decisions in these administrative cases is inadequate or totally unclear, with overly simple descriptions of the facts.  The decisions often do not make sense; the result is sometimes correct but the reasoning entirely  wrong.

If court decisions do not make sense, naturally it will lead to the  litigant reasonably  suspecting their legality. In some cases the courts failed to review the legality of the administrative action, failing to mention obvious illegalities, simply saying the defendant had not infringed the litigant’s rights. .

Why administrative cases?

Judge Hu and colleagues identified a number of factors causing the ongoing large number of petitioners aggrieved by administrative cases, both external and internal to the courts. The report often refers to “some courts” acting in a certain way, without quantifying the percentage–leading the careful reader to wonder whether it really means “most,” but the judges are reluctant to say so. Their analysis is summarized below.

1.  Status of the courts

The basic reason is that the constitutional status of the court has not been implemented. “Big government, small court” (大政府，小法院) is an undeniable fact. A court has the status of a department at the same level of government, so under this structure, it cannot be a countervailing force vis a vis the same level of government. When a court is hearing a case, the defendant county head, as deputy Party secretary  calls the court president in “for a chat.” If the status of the court in the political system is not changed, it cannot decide cases independently and the rate of petitioning about administrative cases will not go down.

2.  Structure of administrative trial divisions

Local courts have jurisdiction over most local administrative cases, but they are under the control of local government, which interferes in every aspect of the case.  The local courts make decisions that violate the law, ordinary people’s faith in the justice system declines, so many petitioning cases.

3.  Court problems

The ideal of justice for the people not implemented, because some courts, in the name of  “serving the greater situation,” stress protecting local stability but fail to protect people’s rights, issuing illegal decisions, harming the prestige of the judiciary, causing disputes between officials and ordinary people that could have been resolved through legal means to be pushed into petitioning.

Cases are bounced back and forth between courts, with no court undertaking a serious review of the case. Courts are seeking to close cases without resolving the underlying issues. With the courts as the place for resolving social disputes and amendment of the Administrative Litigation Law (expanding its jurisdiction), aggrieved litigants, holding sheafs of court decisions are petitioning higher courts, particularly the #2 Circuit Court. If the reasoning is not clear or transparent, ordinary people will just think it is “officials all protecting one another” and petition.

Compounding the problem is weakness in the administrative divisions in the courts and the reception office of the courts. The administrative divisions do not have many cases, so outstanding judges are reassigned, and the team of judges in these divisions is unstable.   In the reception office of the lower courts, staff often fails to explain the law to litigants, and are high-handed.

Litigants

Litigants often not educated, do not understand the law, and insist on their view, thinking that if they make a fuss, the issue will be solved.(My former student wrote an account of her experience dealing with petitioners in the #1 Circuit Court, linked here, while the issue of litigation-related petitioners (涉诉信访) receives attention in this long academic article.)

What to do?

The issues with the status of the courts in the political structure a are beyond the authority of the #2 Circuit Court,  so what Judge Hu had within his authority to do included:

• doing a better job dealing with petitioners at the court;
•  training lower courts to better handle administrative cases;
• better communicating with Party/government, including arranging training for the courts and Party/government, so that officials better understand their obligations under the law;
• doing a better job of public education (宣传教育) through publicizing cases.

Comments

The authors do not venture comments on whether the situation that they describe is typical for other areas of the country, but a quick search reveals courts in other areas of the country raising many of the same issues.

Will the current judicial reforms be able to deal with some of the issues raised by the authors of this study?  Only partially, it seems.  The future change in appointment and funding, better training for and treatment of local judges should be helpful. The 2015 regulations forbidding leading official interference in court cases should, in theory, reduce local government official interference in the local courts, but more needs to happen to educate local officials to comply with the law.  Regulations issued earlier this year mandating legal counsel for Party and state organs may be helpful in the long term. It may be helpful for the #2 Circuit Court to reach out to local lawyers to advise petitioners, as the #1 Circuit Court has done, but whether local lawyers are willing to do so (on a pro-bono basis, as is true in Shenzhen), or possibly that they are concerned that they may be accused of trouble-making under new Ministry of Justice regulations remains to be seen. It is clear from the report that deep-seated attitudes towards law and ordinary people held by government officials are changing only very slowly.

One of the less recognized aspects of China’s judicial reforms is the live streaming (and video archiving) of Chinese court hearings. other than the coverage of the Bo Xilai case.  (I put myself in the category of the persons who were formerly unaware of this development). This blogpost looks (briefly) at SPC policies, current developments, and some very thoughtful analysis of the issues by members of the Chinese judiciary. It follows from my previous blogpost  on online broadcasts of Supreme People’s Court (SPC) public hearings.

Several times this month (July, 2016), President Zhou Qiang has highlighted live streaming (and video libraries) of court hearings, most recently on 18 July, when he spoke about China’s “Smart Courts” and the SPC’s 3.0 Initiative, and reflects the information technology orientation of the Chinese courts (see this brief article on the topic).

In streaming court cases, the SPC and local judiciary are part of a worldwide trend. Even the US federal courts are experimenting with them, with the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit taking the lead.  The courts of Queensland (Australia) have recently issued a paper, looking at the issues from an Australian law perspective and very usefully providing a survey of the law worldwide on  major issues.

What are the Chinese courts doing?

The Chinese courts are implementing live broadcasting and video libraries of a selected, but increasing number of cases, with courts in more prosperous areas taking the lead. The Guangzhou courts were among the courts to broadcast court proceedings first. A minority of those cases are found on the SPC’s Court Tv website and most are found on local court websites, often on that of provincial high courts.  The cases tend to be primarily civil cases, with some criminal and a few administrative cases.

On the website of the Beijing courts for example, there are total of approximately 500 cases, of which 364 are civil cases, including an unfair dismissal case brought against Carrefour, 106 criminal cases, including one with an unrepresented defendant, and quite a few cases involving methamphetamine trafficking. The most popular one is a 2014 corruption case. There are 12 administrative cases, including a case against challenging a housing demolition decision by the Fangshan government.

The Zhejiang High Court seems to have video libraries of hearings in two places: this one has links to hearings for sentence commutation, such as this one, while another website has a broad range of cases, including this recent one from the Wenzhou courts, in which the defendant is being prosecuted for trafficking women into prostitution.

SPC’s 2015 report Judicial Transparency of Chinese Courts highlighted the broadcasting of Chinese court trials, noting that by the end of 2014, there were 519 live broadcasting of court trials through the SPC’s China Court’s Live Trial website (http://ts.chinacourt.org/). and that the local courts had streamed over 80,000 court trials. The numbers are much higher than that (close to 5000 on the SPC’s website) and certainly many more on local court websites.

Legal and Policy background

Streaming of Chinese court hearings is based on 2010 SPC regulations (Provisions on the Live Broadcasting and Rebroadcasting of Court Trials by the People’s Courts) and is linked to the 4th Five Year Court Reform Plan:

15. Establish mechanisms for audio and video recording the entire course of hearings.Strengthen the establishment of technical courtrooms, promoting the full audio-video recording of trial proceedings.

Streaming is also linked to the SPC’s five year plans related to information technology:including  a 2013-17 plan on the Informatization of the courts (人民法院信息化建设五年发展规划（2013-2017）) and two ongoing ones, the Five Year Plan on the Informatization of the People’s Courts, 2016-20(人民法院信息化建设五年发展规划（2016-2020)  and the SPC’s Five Year Informatization Plan (最高人民法院信息化建设五年发展规划（2016-2020)).

The 2010 Regulations do not provide specific protection for the rights of individuals, but focus on the type of cases to broadcast and approval procedures for broadcasts.

Article 2 The people’s court may choose the openly tried cases of higher public attention, greater social impact, and of legal publicity and education significance to make live broadcasts of and rebroadcast court trials. The live broadcasting and rebroadcasting of court trials are prohibited for the following cases:

(1) cases that are not openly tried in accordance with the law since any national secret, trade secret, individual privacy, or juvenile delinquency, among others, is involved;

(2) criminal cases on which procuratorial organs clearly require the non-live broadcasting and rebroadcasting of court trials for justifiable reasons;

(3) civil and administrative cases on which the parties clearly require the non-live broadcasting and rebroadcasting of court trials for justifiable reasons; and

(4) other cases of which the live broadcasting and rebroadcasting are inappropriate.[Translation from Chinalawinfo].

Comments from some local judges 

While the SPC leadership is highlighting the virtues of the streaming of trials, some local judges, likely writing from their personal experience, and comparing Chinese rules with counterparts worldwide, are more critical.

These judges from the  Guangzhou courts (judges with several years of experience with trial streaming) raised issues concerning privacy rights, the right to a fair trial, and the public’s right to know.

• The privacy of litigants is not respected sufficiently; they are concerned that their private matters will be released online;
• Open justice is necessary to consider the relationship between state power and individual private rights, but also the public’s right to know and the right to privacy of the parties must be balanced.
• For criminal cases, for the defendant, the trial webcast is equivalent to a disguised form of a public rally– it could mean that the person has the label of  “criminal” for life .
• In civil disputes, some statements in court may involve aspects of the private life that the parties or other related persons do not want publicized. Meanwhile, network videos and enormous destructive power of “human flesh searches” combined with public opinion on the parties and their families will have a significant impact, which are likely to lead to their privacy being violated.
• Not all the information and all the facts of the case should be disclosed online. Some information  can be shielded, such as date of birth, place of work, home address, ID card number, bank account information, and the personal information of related parties, such as close relatives, witnesses and other participants.
• Parties should have a veto over the trial webcast, and in criminal cases, the victim and his or her family should be consulted as well.  They also suggest shielding some information from broadcast.

As a staff member of theChengdu  courts noted, similar issues are raised by the database of court decisions, such as a case in which the plaintiff’s claim for damages from a traffic accident (including the loss of the ability to procreate) made him the laughingstock of his workplace.

Other local judges have commented that the cases selected for broadcast are not representative, too simple, and that they are sometimes selected for political reasons.

The underlying problem both for online streaming of cases and the court database is that there is not enough Chinese privacy law to protect individuals. Whether the SPC will issue more detailed regulations on privacy in internet broadcasts of court proceedings is unclear.

It does seem clear, that an important rationale for streaming cases is to educate the masses–杀鸡敬猴。Politically sensitive cases are not generally streamed.

For the observer of the Chinese courts, it is a fascinating resource in many ways, whether it is noting the number of cases with people’s assessors, women prosecutors, judges, demeanor of the legal professionals, parties, and bailiffs.