On Current Assizes System Of Chinese Basic People's Courts

Assizes, just as its name implies, means judges or courts judge cases at specific sites outside the courts. It has spread to many districts in China to some extent.To study on assizes, we had to get an in-depth investigation on its operating ambient: the rural area in transformation. Increasing demands on disputes resolution, crisis of non-litigation disputes resolution, embarrassment of litigation disputes resolution and peasants' special demands on disputes resolution have led the disputes resolution in rural area to trouble. Assizes is an effort that basic people's courts have made to overcome the trouble and it tries to improve the original litigation disputes resolution. Compared to the fixed trial, assizes has advantages on litigation costs and local resources; it has great value in village order and the rule of law. But it also has some disadvantages such as difficulty of long-term implementation, non-institutionalization, impact to non-litigation system and hardness to be identified. Although assizes will eventually decline, it still has the necessity of long-term implementation and it can make contributions to the reform of People's Tribunals setting and the communication between the formal law and informal law. Assizes has a bright prospect in today's rural society, but this prospect relies on the institutional reconstruction of assizes.I suggest the Supreme People's Court set rules on assizes in the form of 'Regulations about Several Issues on the Basic People's Courts' Implementation of Assizes' which makes explicit rules on the implementer, the form of the organization, the scope of implementation, the types of the cases, especially on the mechanisms for ensuring adequate funding, encouraging, supervision and punishment. The basic people's courts should pay attention to overcoming the judicial centrism, the compatibility between assizes and other institutions and correctly understand the relationship between assizes and judicial-modernization. In this way, the implementation of the assizes can be better implemented.