PEOPLE’S CHOICE

China is now letting the people judge its judges

Strengthening the rule of law in China.
Strengthening the rule of law in China.
Image: Screenshot from chinacourt.org
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China now has a People’s Choice Award for judges.

Last week, the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) kicked off a campaign called “My Favorite Good Judges,” which allows the public to vote for their top 10 favourite judges from 33 nominees selected by the top Chinese court. As co-organizers, state broadcaster CCTV and several online news portals will make public the judges’ resumes and examples of their judgments for people to vote on.

China has vowed to strengthen the rule of law since president Xi Jinping formally took office in 2013. But the promised legal reforms (link in Chinese)—including setting up circuit courts and implementing a jury system—may only result in greater autonomy for courts but not independence, legal scholars say, as Chinese courts still have to obey the Communist Party. In January, SPC president Zhou Qiang made a rare remark calling on his colleagues to combat the erroneous Western notion of “judicial independence,” a concept which he said could undermine China’s legal system. In 2015, Chinese courts convicted almost all defendants.

The latest campaign aims to “let the people judge the people’s judges,” Zhou was paraphrased by state news agency Xinhua (link in Chinese) as saying at the launch event on March 2. The 55-year-old said he hopes that through the campaign, the public can get know Chinese courts better and have more confidence in Chinese judges. The list of the final 10 judges will also take into account the views of professional judges, according to Xinhua.

Profiles of the nominees, along with their headshots and photos of them at work, have been posted online since the launch of the campaign. Among the nominees are judge Wu Wenshan from a court in Tianjin, who judges five to six times the required number of cases every year, and once dealt with 17 cases in one day, a personal record. Another prominent candidate is judge Yang Huahui, the only Tibetan speaker at a local court in Gansu’s Tibetan autonomous region, whose story has been made a film (link in Chinese).