The Dream Factory of China

Qianhai Cooperation Zone People’s Court, which was designated to carry out pioneering judicial reform, Thursday released its innovative practices of adjudication, most of which were designed to deal with cases that involve Hong Kong, Macao or Taiwan subjects.

According to the authority, the practices aim to improve the efficiency of litigation, help the court to lead the judicial proceedings, provide more channels to resolve disputes, offer law ascertainment services, allow the application of non-mainland laws, recruit more professionals, build a strong mediator and people’s assessor team, and encourage exchanges and communication with other judicial institutions.

“Among those practices, seven approaches are worth mentioning,” said Peng Liang, presiding judge of the court.

“To shorten the usually long duration of litigation proceedings, the defendant will be forced to hand in statements of defense and be subject to a compulsory plea. Also, we have set up a pretrial conference system to help improve efficiency. Some of our cases involve Hong Kong, Macao or Taiwan subjects, which take a long time to serve the legal documents. To solve the problem, we now allow the plaintiff or the lawyer to serve the defendant with documents related to the case.

“To avoid malicious prosecution, we will hand out harsh punishments to the subjects, and force them to pay some of the legal costs. The judge will make a thorough consideration of the legal expenses and in some cases the losing party will be ordered to pay all of the counsel fees,” Peng said.

She added that the court has introduced a pretrial mediation mechanism for Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan parties.

“Hong Kong, Macao or Taiwan parties can also appeal to the court to use non-mainland laws in handling their cases,” she added.

According to the latest statistics, the court had accepted and heard 7,019 cases, including 5,156 civil and commercial cases, from February 2015 to this May. Among them, a total of 3,022 commercial cases involved Hong Kong, Macao or Taiwan parties.

During that period, there were four cases that were tried based on foreign laws and 27 cases were handled based on Hong Kong laws. Seven out of the 27 cases have concluded.