Strait Inter-district Civil Judicial Assistance

On 29th June 2010, the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits ("ARATS") of the mainland China and the Straits Exchange Foundation ("SEF") of Taiwan signed the Taiwan-Mainland Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement ("ECFA") in Chongqing, which indicated a new era of the cross-strait relations. The cross-strait economic and trade cooperation is gradually turning from an unequal unilateral-way model to an equal mutual-way, and thus prospects a significant opportunity for development. Along with the deeper contacts, more and more legal disputes will come out between two sides of the strait. It becomes to be an urgent issue to study and solve those issues in dealing with the individual legal disputes, such as the application of law, the determination of jurisdiction and other procedural issues in the consequent litigation or arbitration proceedings. Therefore, the research on the cross-strait judicial assistance should have a realistic and practical importance to resolve the legal issues arising from civil and commercial activities.Initiated from the present status of civil judicial assistance between two sides of the strait and combined with specific judicial case studies, the author of this thesis has made research on the laws, regulations and judicial interpretations with regard to the judicial assistance as adopted by the legislatures and judicial departments of both the mainland and Taiwan. The purpose of this research is to resolve several fundamental matters in this regard.This thesis consists of four parts:the first part is relevant to the service of civil legal documents; the second part focuses on the investigation and collection of evidence in civil legal affairs; the third relates to the recognition and enforcement of civil judgments made in the mainland and Taiwan, and the four one is to deal with the issue on the recognition and enforcement of arbitration awards made in the mainland and of Taiwan. All of the aforesaid are the general procedures which are commonly encountered in the civil cases. The author uses various methods of study to carry out the research on this subject and starts the study from the present status of cross-strait civil judicial assistance, and further to analyze the pros and corns and the direction of future development as well. During the course of study, the practical experiences of judicial assistance between the mainland and Hong Kong and Macao respectively are taken into consideration. It is expected that two sides of the strait will move forward on the judicial co-assistance for civil and commercial activities under the principle of one-China in the regards such as changing the signing subjects, further enriching the supplemental agreement, or separately signing a civil and trade judicial assistance agreement, so that it can be found out of the ways to establish a normal and efficient system of judicial assistance between the strait eventually.