Judge as a Profession, New Image of Chinese Judges

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Friday, February 21, 2003

Judge as a Profession, New Image of Chinese Judges

Gone are the days in when whoever came from whichever trade with whatever academic background and work experience could become a judge. Professionalism of judges, we should say, is now the clarion call in the judicial reform for the people's court.

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Fewer in number of judges but better in quality

"Fewer but better in professionalism" has become a vivid description for the ultimate goal of China's judicial construction. To meet the criteria, it is highly necessary to raise higher the "step-stone". The National Judicial Examination, in a sense, provides a significant system guarantee for building up a judge corps of high quality.

However, the last National Judicial Examination ended up in a great embarrassment: staffs of the national judicial organs delivered a low average grade and pass rate, coupled with a complete failure of some courts including a few of judges in office.

According to statistics released by the Political dept. under the Supreme People's Court, the national judges have shown a big increase in cultural quality by adoption of strict profession access and judge selection. Among the total 0.22mn judges in 2001, those who had a university degree or above increased by 1.8 times and those who had a master degree grew by 2.3 times, whereas those who had a senior middle school degree or below decreased by 51.5 percent as compared to that in 1995.

Training----a task of top priority in view of the current situation for judges

Judges across China come to around 0.22 million in number, while those who have a university education account for less than one third. Yet, they handle about 6 million cases every year. To guarantee the justice and efficiency in case hearing, it is therefore an arduous job and also a long way to go for enhancing the judges through training. The Supreme People's Court demands that the incumbent judges who are not university graduates should reach the university level within five years if they are under 40 of age while those must receive an intensive training of a half or one year in accordance with law curricula for college students if they are over 40.

The past five years have witnessed a formation of two-level pattern of training with the Supreme People's Court and provincial high courts played the main role as organizer. Since 1998, National Judges College has organized 75 professional training programs, wherein attended 1,275 (vice) presidents from high or intermediate courts, presidents from among local courts and high-level judges. High courts at all levels have held 3,000-odd training programs with 0.2 million attendance of judges and court staffs.

By PD Online Staff Zhu Lizhen

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