Tag Archives: performance targets

Communist Party and the Courts, Court Reform, Elderly law, Family Law

Supreme People’s Court rushes to achieve year end targets

Leave a comment

imgres-4The rush towards year end in the Supreme People’s Court (SPC), as in the business world, means a flurry of announcements of important developments, to ensure that the SPC meets its own performance targets.  Among the recent announcements are:

  • reform of the maritime courts, to make them internationally influential (this has both political and legal implications, blogpost to come);
  • approval by central Party authorities of the third round of judicial reform pilots, and the holding of a large scale meeting of representatives from the Leading Group on Judicial Reform with the SPC and Supreme People’s Procuratorate (SPP),  on the focus (personnel reforms) and roll out of these projects.  Jiang Wei,deputy director of the Office of the Central Leading Group for Judicial Reform, spoke along with his SPC and SPP counterparts.  Political legal committee secretaries from the pilot areas attended, along with court and procuratorate officials.
  • Reform of the family court system, announced at a conference held in Guangzhou, attended by Justice Du Wanhua, highlighting that the rush of judges to meet performance targets (closing cases) Iamong other factors) has had a negative effect on children, elderly, disabled, and women.  The SPC likely published typical/model family law cases in November (discussed in this  blogpost)  because pulling together those cases was part of the preparations for the Guangzhou conference;
  • progress report and further plans on improving judicial assistance (separate but related to legal assistance), with the release  of the2014  multi-agency document (Central Political Legal Committee, SPC, SPP, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Public Security, Ministry of Justice), stating that the central government had allocated 700 million RMB for judicial assistance and local governments  1.7 billion RMB, targeted at financial assistance for victims of crimes and others, with funds allocated to about 80,000 in 2014, (certainly a fraction of what is needed)
  • long pronouncement by Justice Shen Deyong on the “standardization” of the courts, citing the important status and important role of the judiciary in the governance of the country, but the growing contradiction between the needs of the people and  judicial resources and judicial capacity, decrying the lack of “top level design,” and calling for the implementation of related reforms.

This list will be supplemented later this month, as further announcements are made.

 

Communist Party and the Courts, Court Operations, Court Reform

Supreme People’s Court overhauls judicial performance indicators

2 Comments
351916247
Jincheng Shanxi court evaluation meeting

The 27 December headline story in the People’s Court Daily and the national court website is the decision by the Party Committee of the Supreme People’s Court (the Court), issued to the entire court system, to:

  • cancel court performance rankings;
  • Except for those targets for resolving cases that according to law are compulsory, the remaining targets should become reference data for analyzing judicial operations.
  • oppose the practice of avoiding accepting cases at year end with the excuse that it would bring down the court’s case resolution index.

This is the result of its own fieldwork, as well as criticism from the lower courts, NPC delegates, academics, and lawyers. Chinese courts avoid accepting new cases close to year end if the case will not be resolved until the next year, because these cases will pull down a court’s performance indicators, even though the rights of litigants can be sacrificed.

Chinese and foreign academics have highlighted the negative consequences of judicial performance performance targets for many years.

He Fan, a Court judge on the staff of the research office, while applauding the change, pointed out in his blog that despite the change of policy by the Court, some lower court judges remain under pressure by local court leadership to work overtime to resolve cases.

What indicators will replace them?

The reports do not link to the underlying Court document and so it remains unclear what performance indicators will replace the ones that have been abolished, or which indicators fall into the second category.  The judicial reforms anticipate having a smaller number of judges handling an increasing number of cases.  If judges find the new performance evaluation system unacceptable, this may lead to an even greater outflow of judges than is already occurring.