China's top court official says efforts to promote judicial reform

In this March 30, 2006 photo, two people stand in front of the Chinese Supreme People's Court building in Beijing, China. STRAFP BEIJING Solid achievements have been made by Chinese courts in pushing forward judicial reform, as well as continuously promoting and advancing a just, efficient and authoritative judicial system, an official with China's Supreme People's Court SPC said on Friday.

In a press conference on the achievements Chinese courts have made since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012, strong measures have been taken to tackle problems that harm judicial justice, said Shen Liang, a vice-president of the SPC.

In 2015, China instituted a case filing register, replacing the previous case filing review system, in order to lower the bar for case filing, Shen said. More than 95.7 percent of cases can be filed on the spot, he said.

Shen said that such efforts were made to improve the country's litigation system, as well as to impose lenient penalties on those who admit their guilt and accept punishments in criminal cases.

The Chinese courts have pushed for the reform of the criminal procedure system with a focus on court proceedings and strictly adhering to the principles of legality, evidence-based verdicts and presumption of innocence, so that just verdicts are given to the guilty while the innocent are protected from criminal punishment, according to Shen.

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Shen said that China has been optimizing the exercise of judicial powers, as well as a number of assistants assigned to judges, allowing the latter to focus on adjudicative work.