Chinese Communist Party announces reform measures to increase judicial independence
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China’s ruling Communist Party has announced measures to increase judicial independence, particularly by shining more sunlight on party officials getting involved in legal matters, the Associated Press reports.
While some critics scoff at the likelihood of true reform, some others see the move as positive at the local level, where meddling by local officials has led to increasing social unrest.
“It will make officials more cautious, and it is a measure to safeguard judicial independence,” said Xie Youping, a legal scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai, to the AP.
The measures include keeping record of any involvement by party officials in legal matters; removing courts from the jurisdiction of local officials; and choosing judges from among legal professionals.
Youping says remedies for the problems of jurisdiction and judicial selection already have been introduced but that monitoring the actions of party officials is new.
The announcement was made today at the end of the secret annual meeting of the ruling Communist Party’s Central Committee, with a pledge to act in accordance with China’s constitution and law.
President Xi Jinping, who also holds the post of General Secretary of the Communist Party, has been under pressure to restore the Chinese public’s dwindling faith in the judicial system, reports the Wall Street Journal. Analysts told the Journal that “the old trade-off that previously defined politics in the country—breakneck economic growth and increasing standards of living in exchange for an unquestioning acceptance of party authority—no longer holds.”
Some scoffed at the announcement. “The party’s dictatorship comes before ruling in accordance of the law,” Zhang Lifan, a historian and political analyst in Beijing, told the AP.
Zheng Yongnian, a political scientist at National University of Singapore, agreed with this sentiment in an interview with the Journal. “They are talking about the legal system in a very narrow sense. The goal of course is the continuous survival of the Communist Party.”
But others are hopeful about smaller-scale implications. “When you have local-level cadres doing something that breaches the law, they should be answerable to the law, and they cannot interfere with the local judiciary,” said Steve Tsang, a senior fellow at the University of Nottingham’s China Policy Institute, to the AP.
