Analysis About The Difficult Positions & The Legislative Improvement For Civil Suit Collateral To Criminal Proceedings In China

Being an important system in the domain of criminal litigations in China, the system of civil suit collateral to criminal proceedings aims at solving issues of civil damage compensation of the victims caused by the criminal behaviors. Compared with both the criminal proceedings and the civil proceedings which are independent from each other, the system of civil suit collateral to criminal proceedings contains a number of incomparable advantages in terms of theory designing, such as providing conveniences for the victims in participating in the litigations and reducing the litigation exhaustion, saving judicial resources which reflects the economy of litigation, and protecting the consistency and seriousness of the judgments effectively.The cause of the abovementioned predicament is the defects in system designing. Due to the oversimplification and even the internal conflicts of the current legislative regulations, such as inappropriate restriction of scope of accepting cases, confusion in defining the scope of compensation, unreasonable restriction to the litigation rights of the victims which leads to the weakening of their litigation status, especially, the denial and banishment of the compensation for spiritual damage of the victims has further turn the system of civil suit collateral to criminal proceedings into the procedural obstacle that hinders and restricts the obtaining of the damage compensation and relief. Another disadvantage of the system is the serious inconsistence between the legal status and actual function of the procuratorial organizations, which are another object in the civil suit collateral to criminal proceedings besides the victims. Such fatal defect of system design has already provoked various criticizes and public voices for abandoning the system in both the academia and practice circle. Therefore, the reform of the system is imperative, of which, mode selection is the primary problem to solve, whether to continue and improve the current collateral mode, or abandon the system completely and adopt the parallel model, i.e., separation of criminal action and civil action in the Anglo-American law system.The writer holds the opinion that the system of civil suit collateral to criminal proceedings still has its unelectable system value, therefore, copying from the common law system countries indiscriminately and practicing separation of the criminal litigation and civil litigation completely may detaching from the realistic Chinese situation and may not be the most ideal approach. Abandoning the system cannot solve the realistic problems.As far as at this moment, maintaining the system is absolutely reasonable and necessary, however, it also requires an overall reconstruction by taking advantage of the opportunity of amending the Criminal Procedure Law, and solving the original problems of the system by improving and perfecting relevant legislations, such as (a) introducing the compensation for spiritual damage, (2) endowing the parties the option of civil procedures and principle of reasonable defining the compensation in order to strengthening the relief and overall protection of the victims'rights; (3) trying to establish the national compensation system and introducing the property preservation system in order to solve the problems in the enforcements and (4) strengthening the status and functions and remedy the blankness and malpostion in practice of the procuratorial organizations in the civil suit collateral to criminal proceedings through public interest litigation.