Opinion | Mainland leadership needs to deepen legal reform
Efforts at legal reform need to be intensified, otherwise the nation risks facing more international scandals in the coming year
The past year should have been a wake-up call for the authorities: either deepen reform to strengthen the rule of law, or risk more international scandals like those involving Wang Lijun and Chen Guangcheng.
The two men, one a powerful police chief fearing revenge from his boss and the other a rights activist under house arrest, could not have been more different in terms of their status and situation. But despite the very different causes of their flights to seek foreign sanctuary, at the root is the same problem: weak rule of law, compounded by weak checks on official powers.
One solution, if you ask legal reformers, is steering judicial reform in the right direction.
Making judicial officers more professional was the focus of judicial reform under former Supreme Court chief Xiao Yang - a period of reform that saw judges required to sit the same legal professional examination as lawyers and prosecutors.
However, to the dismay of many legal professionals, this reform focus has been pretty much abandoned since 2008, when the official slogan for judicial work became the "Three Supremes" - to serve the interests of the Communist Party, the people and the law, in that order.
With the Communist Party's new leadership now in place, some hold out hope for change and are cautiously welcoming recent positive signs. For example, Meng Jianzhu , the new secretary of the party's Political and Legal Affairs Commission, said in a speech last week that judges should "combine professionalism with populism", and there was no mention of the Three Supremes.
Others want to see more measures to enhance the independence of the judiciary, such as reducing the commission's control of the courts and the removal of party units from courts and law firms. Following new party general secretary Xi Jinping's recent speech on the importance of implementing the constitution, there have also been fresh calls for the courts to review government actions against the standards set out in the constitution - a function allowed by law but not in practice.
