China issues white paper on judicial reform of Chinese courts

X. Promoting Informatization of Courts

Informatization occupies an important position of fundamental, overall and strategic significance in the work of people's courts. In order to adapt to the new challenges brought by the era of "Internet +", the Supreme People's Court has enhanced the building of court informatization version 3.0 and "intelligent court" (which was also included in the Outline of National IT Development Strategy), and promulgated the Five Development Plan for Informatization of People's Courts 2016-2020, with the aid of big data technology, aiming to improve the IT infrastructures, promoting full coverage, mobile interconnection, cross-border integration, in-depth application, transparency, convenience, accessibility, safety and controllability of all kinds of information, and improving the judicial system and modernization of judicial capability of people's courts.

Improving the standard of informatization and development of IT infrastructures. The Supreme People's Court has formulated the standard of court informatization, established an informatization assessment system covering indicators in six respects, including development, application, service, management, security and effect to give unified guidance on the standard and assessment of informatization for the courts nationwide. The Supreme People's Court has been continuously improving the IT infrastructures and promoting the development of "one website" of the courts nationwide. In November 2016, all the courts in our country, including 3,520 courts, 9,277 tribunals and 39 maritime courts were connected with the special court website, thereby laying a solid foundation for realizing whole connection of networks, full coverage of data and accessibility of all the services of people's courts. In the development of IT hardware of courts, so far, over 20,000 scientific and technological tribunals and over 2,160 sets of remote interrogation systems have been established nationwide, 98% of the courts nationwide have established IT-based litigation service halls, and big screens, guide platforms, inquiry machines, net-connected computers and other IT facilities have been used generally. The Supreme People's Court has established a digital library.

Realizing full coverage and system integration of judicial information. The Supreme People's Court has established the national judicial and trial information resource management center, which realizes collection, dispatch, display, management and control of the data and over 20,000 routes of video signals from the courts nationwide, and provides the functions of real-time view of live broadcasting of court trials at the courts at four levels nationwide, exchanges, communications, centralized data management, etc. The Supreme People's Court has built the centralized management platform for the data of people's courts, which realizes storage, display, exchange and sort-out of information of courts nationwide, and is gradually incorporating judicial statistical information and personnel management information. So far, the platform has collected the information of over 94.25 million cases, over 46.30 million documents, 259 judicial research projects, over 24,000 pieces of judicial personnel information, and over 15.17 million pieces of judicial administration information; automatically produced over 470,000 reports and statements, over 10 million pieces of statistical data and over 100 million pieces of case information for the courts nationwide, and automatically built the three-level mutual verification mechanism covering courts, reports and cases, thereby changing the traditional mode of manual statistics, and realizing a significant development in the judicial statistics of the people's courts. The Supreme People's Court has formulated the Certain Provisions on the Numbers of Cases Handled by People's Courts and supplementary standards, the Case Information Standard for People's Courts (2015) and other normative documents to implement code-based management of 3,512 courts nationwide, built a three-level case type system which divides cases into 10 types, 52 sub-types and 131 sub-sub-types, covering 130 kinds of activities in the exercise of judicial functions and powers, thereby laying a solid foundation for building a new standard system for case information.

Promoting the optimization, upgrade and in-depth application of various kinds of information platforms. Under the unified guidance of the Supreme People's Court, the people's courts in all regions have been continuously improving various kinds of information platforms to realize in-depth application of such platforms in serving the public, the enforcement of judgments, judicial management and the society, and vigorously promoting the development of "Internet+ litigation service", and developed a lot of services for the convenience of the people, such as online case filing, online mediation, remote court trial, electronic service and online release of information. The people's courts have improved their judicial information management systems. So far, 99% of the people's courts nationwide have built the case information management systems, realized online circulation of information about main process nodes in judicial activities, digital management of case files, pre-warning on the time limit of trials, process monitoring, risk assessment and quality evaluation, and begun to provide judges with intelligent services for supporting trials, such as consultation concerning laws and regulations, guiding cases, reference to measurement of penalty, one-click typesetting and intelligent correction of errors. The people's courts have intensively explored and exploited the value of judicial data on the centralized data management platform, and with the aid of big judicial data and information, and established the mechanisms for analyzing the quality and effect of trials, hot issues and special types of cases, to improve the forecasts about the situations of trial work, the fields in which controversies and disputes are liable to arise and the situation of economic development. So far, the Supreme People's Court has completed 70 special analysis reports concerning people's well-being and economic and social development, providing strong data support for scientific decision. A digital online service platform on the application of Chinese laws ("Faxin") has been established, which collects over 20 million judgments, typical cases, legal documents, these and other kinds of legal literatures, containing more than 10 billion words in total, and conducts in-depth processing and intelligent push of huge amounts of legal provisions, key points of cases, legal opinions and instrument information, therefore satisfying diversified and precise judicial demands of various groups of people. The Supreme People's Court has established the Judicial Case Research Institute and opened the China Judicial Cases Online, which, supported by the big data technology and the Internet, collects and publishes a large number of Chinese and foreign cases, and intelligently produces typical cases generally recognized, thus promoting the formation of clear and definite guides to the society. A court trial speech recognition system has been developed, which can automatically transform speeches into texts, and identify speakers and their speeches at court trials, with a rate of accuracy of speech recognition of above 90% in trial operation.

Actively using big data to improve the quality and effect of case handling and serve the judicial reform. The courts in all regions have been actively exploring the fields and methods of IT application, with the aid of big data analysis, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, machine learning and other technologies, give full play to the support and protection role of IT and big data in enforcement of judgments, judicial management, judicial services, judicial reform and other areas. In Guizhou, an online cooperative system for case handling integrating the public security and procuratorial organs and courts has been established, which realizes dual circulation of scanned copes and text data of electronic case files, and incorporates a module for setting the unified evidence standard for evidences in criminal cases for the public security and procuratorial organs and courts. Investigators shall upload all the evidences obtained onto the system simultaneously. The system will, according to the pre-set evidence standard and requirements, conduct checks and verifications, and give hints and pre-warnings. Any evidence not meeting the pre-set evidence standard and requirements will be unable to enter into the next stage of the litigation procedure, thereby unifying the standard of criminal evidences and preventing cases in which people are unjustly, falsely or wrongly charged or sentenced. The courts in Hebei have developed an "intelligent" trial support system, which, through reference to a huge amount of judgments, and analysis of all the electronic case files of the cases in process, summarizes the characteristics and essential factors of the cases, and on the basis of the facts, focus of disputes, applicable laws and other circumstances of the cases, automatically and accurately pushes guiding or reference cases that directly relate to the cases in process to the judges handling the same. The courts in Shanghai have established the "Big Data and Information System of the Shanghai Higher People's Court", have accomplished the building of standardized big database, modern digital machine room, collective cloud platforms and other infrastructures, and through the application of big judicial data, have formulated the case weight measuring system, assessment standard and system for public credibility of the judiciary and methods for measuring annual number of cases handled by judges, thereby vigorously promoting the enforcement of judgments and judicial reform. Shanghai Higher People's Court has formulated the case weight coefficients for 1,023 types of causes of action, and realized an integrated assessment of the workloads and performance of judges handling cases of different types, with different degrees of difficulty and in different fields, which has become a scientific basis for determining judge quotas and allocating judicial resources. The courts in Zhejiang have conducted integrated online data processing in respect of the road traffic accidents, broken the data barriers among mediation organizations, the insurers' claim settlement departments, public security organs and courts, and on the basis of case adjudication standard, developed a compensation calculator applicable to the parties involved and judges, so that the parties involved can calculate the compensation by themselves and form reasonable expectations for the final awards. With the aid of the integrated platform for the handling of road traffic accidents, the number of cases of claim for compensation for traffic accidents handled by Yuhang District People's Court in Hangzhou in 2016 was 50% lower than that in the previous year; and among the 3,238 cases of disputes over traffic accidents handled by the Court, 3,076 cases were settled through the insurance mediation committee using the pre-trial mediation procedure, accounting for 95% of the total cases.