Identification And Characteristics Of Civil Fraud Litigation

With the social and economic development, society integrity has gradually declined. Seeking illegal benefits by committing fraud with a variety of ways become widely spread. This includes civil fraud litigation, which gains illegal benefits through incorrect adjudication by the Court. Fraud litigation is not true civil litigation legal relationship, and is different from the breach of trust. Civil fraud litigation has the following characters: lack of antagonism, concealed purpose, illegal and harmful behavior. The types of civil fraud litigation are pursuing financial interests, avoiding responsibility, and evasion of laws. Lack of society integrity, loose of moral constraints, distinctiveness of civil litigation, rules of evidence, deficiencies in the mediation system, the appraisal systems of judges, and lack of disciplinary system are main factors for civic fraud legations to occur. Principle of disposition is one of the fundamental principles of civil litigation. The parties have the rights within the limits prescribed by law to act their own civil rights and litigation rights. Taking civil litigation is determined by the parties themselves, and the judge adjudicates cases based on the evidence provided by the parties. The parties can agree on the evidence, or directly admitted relevant facts, or even give up rights based on rules of evidence. However, the current judicial system put too much weight on legal facts, overly emphases the parties'litigation obligations, so the judge often ignore the essential nature of the evidence, and no longer seek truth through debate and evidence, but only satisfy the procedural requirements of the law. As long the evidence is meet form requirements of the rules, and then it is regarded as truth. The limitations in self-admitting system and mediation system are now become tools for fraud litigations. As self-admitting system exempts the other party from providing evidence, the court should consider admitted facts as the basis for adjudication without further review. The perpetrator of fraud litigation often conceals the facts through the self-admitting system. The court usually does not prohibit that the parties reach a mediation agreement, which is a manifestation of exercising disposition right. The current judge appraisal system overly emphases the case closure rate, mediation rate, and target management, therefore the judge often departures from the pursuit of fair justice, and is not motivated to explore the facts or conduct rigorous review. To achieve speedy ruling, high mediation rate, few appeal, few misjudge rate, and accommodate form requirements of procedures, judge would ignore the nature of the case, give up investigation efforts, and simply adjudicate or mediate the case based on self-admitted fact, which provides a loophole for fraud litigation. By taking advantage of the judicial power, the fraud litigations bring damage to legitimate interests of all parties, interfere with the normal order of proceedings, cause unnecessary waste of judicial resources, seriously undermine judicial authority, and jeopardize the credibility of the Court of Justice. Be vigilant to the type of cases prone to fraud, enforcing the judge's accountability, improving the competency of judges, taking considerable amount of judicial practices, and not blindly chasing speedy ruling and higher mediation rate, all these will help to detect abnormal activity in the litigation and see through the fraud litigation. While adjudicating cases prone to fraud, judges should increase review efforts, refrain from simplifying proceeding processes, and launch supplemental processes on suspicious cases, extend or suspend trial, or investigate the cases by authority, improve pre-trial preparation procedure, exchange evidence before trial to filter and prevent litigation fraud. In particular, the judges should strengthen review efforts on self-admitted facts to effectively detect fraud, and prevent succeeding of the cases. By understanding the behavioral characteristics of fraud litigation, we can identify some abnormal signals, as there are no real civil legal relations between the parties. With the help of limiting applicable self-admitting rules, increasing the supervision of civil mediation, appropriately strengthening authority of courts, establishing information sharing mechanism, we can improve the detection of fraud litigations and therefore reduce its negative impacts.