Professor Zhou Hanhua: More Elaborate Design Is Needed in Judicial Reform

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Recently, the Chinese government has stressed that it would comprehensively implement judicial responsibility system and the supporting reforms and speed up the construction of a fair, highly efficient, and authoritative socialist judicial system. How does the Chinese law circle think about this round of reform? On July 12, 2017, the newspaper People’s Daily interviewed Professor Zhou Hanhua, a research fellow at the CASS Law Institute, on this question. In the interview, Professor Sun pointed out that this round of reform is of great significance in that it tries to realize the objectives of the professionalization, delayering, socialization, diversification and informatization of the legal system in China. The reform also tries to construct a more efficient judicial operation mechanism through the improvement of socialization mechanisms. The main achievements made by China in this round of reform include: first, marked improvement of the professionalization and specialization of judges and procurators at the grassroots level; second obvious improvement of judicial efficiency; third, marked raise in the level of people’s satisfaction; and fourth, profound transformation of judicial systems and mechanisms. With respect to future deepening of the reform, Professor Zhou put forward the following proposals: in the future reform, china should take “judicial responsibility” as the key, better balance and coordinate the relationship between “authorization” and “supervision”. At the current stage, the reform of judicial responsibility system has changed the administrative case handling mode, but new trial supervision and management mechanisms has not yet been completely established. Under this circumstance, how to prevent such phenomena as different treatments of similar cases from affecting judicial credibility and appropriately handle the relationship between independent performance of functions by judges and strengthening the supervision over judicial activities has become a difficult problem to be solved in the reform of the judicial responsibility system. China needs to attach equal importance to delegation of powers to lower levels and strengthening supervision over power, develop a flattened judicial power operation mechanism, truly enhance the sense of honor of the judicial profession, and realize as soon as possible the transformation of the supervision system from a typical external supervision system that relies mainly on the assessment of the handling of cases to an endogenous supervision system that mainly relies on professional ethics and comprehensive judicial openness. Finally, China needs to further elaborate the institutional design of judicial reform by giving more prominence to demonstration by example or guidance to different types of areas, especially by strengthening the top-level design.