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China's Supreme Court Publicizes Verdicts in Full Text
For the first time in its history, China's Supreme People's Court posted transcripts of its lengthy court verdicts today on the Internet, in another move to further open trials to the public and encourage public participation in the legal process.
"As of today, the Supreme Court will select some of its court verdict papers for publication in full every week," said Liu Huisheng, SPC spokesman, at a press conference held Monday.
The publication will be selective because some verdicts involve privacy of litigants, especially women and minors, and others are just judgments on procedural matters, in which the public "has no interest," Liu said.
According to the spokesman, court verdicts on the most important and nationally-known cases will be published in the national media, while other important and common cases will be issued in government documents, and most of the typical cases will be available on the Internet at www.court.gov.cn or www.rmfyb.com. The first batch of six court verdicts had been posted on the net by press time.
A special library has also been set up by the Supreme Court for the public to look through all the publicized court papers. According to law, court verdicts should be announced publicly, but in practice this has been done for only the litigants and their attorneys.
"Court verdicts records the full course of the trial and how evidences was presented and analyzed," the spokesman said, noting that "the public can see for themselves whether the court judgment is fair or not once it is publicized."
Open court verdicts also help the public to understand the law, he said.
Along with today's reform, the form of court papers is also undergoing dramatic changes in this country, Liu said.
Judges used to announce that a judgment was made based on a certain part of a certain article of a certain law, without even citing the specific contents of the law. Court papers were just three to five pages long in the past decades, and few people could understand how the judgments were made.
But today, these papers have ballooned to 20 and 30 pages to detail all the evidence, arguments and analysis included in the trials, and are understandable to the general public, he said.
Sources say that today's publication of court verdicts unprecedented in the history of the Supreme Court, with only one exception: the full-text verdicts on the Lin Biao and Jiang Qing counter-revolutionary cliques were published in the People's Daily in 1981.
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