‘Smart courts’ to provide better legal services in China

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By CGTN's Chen Ran

China will further explore state-of-the-art technologies such as cloud computing and big data in pushing forward the construction of smart courts.

Zhou Qiang, head of the Supreme People's Court (SPC), made the remarks while delivering the SPC’s annual work report to the fifth session of the 12th National People’s Congress, the country’s top legislature, in Beijing on Sunday.

Information technology promotes modern judicial practices, and smart courts have already taken shape in the country, according to Zhou. By the end of 2016, a total of 3,520 courts, 9,238 people's tribunals and 39 maritime detached tribunals nationwide have connected to the specially-designed court network where data and video information can be shared by over 300,000 court staff.

The SPC has set up three important platforms -- the judicial case research institute, the judicial big data research institute, and the digital library -- to effectively promote the development and application of judicial big data.

In addition, all the open trial cases have been live broadcast via the Internet since July 1 last year. Some 625,000 live trials at different levels reached over 2 billion viewers.

Zhou stressed the importance of enhancing the integrity between the court network and technologies including online case filing and automatic speech recognition in tribunals.

“Improving the level of informatization promotes social fairness and justice,” Zhou said.

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