On The Relevance Of Evidence

It is well known that evidence is of great significant in modern litigation, it not only plays a fundamental role in asking for the realization of substantive rights, but also plays the role of raw materials and power in promoting the process of litigation activities. It can’t do without corresponding evidence to support when the defendant shall be investigated for criminal responsibility in criminal proceedings. It is also can’t be lack of appropriate evidence to support when the civil rights of the parties need to be relief in civil proceedings. Therefore, Chinese scholars have been attached great importance to the concept of evidence-related research in the study. Among them, the relevance of evidence is particularly worthy of further study. Because:on the one hand, from the form of evidence in the different stages of the proceedings, the relevance of evidence is the attribute that all the evidence always have from first to last. Thus, the relevance of evidence has the unparalleled important position in theory; on the other hand, on the whole, our evidence system by continental law system country far-reaching influence and so its legislation style is similar to our country, it shows that our country lacks of uniform evidence codes, and it also lacks of the complete evidence rules. Previously, there has not the word of the "relevance" in China’s procedural law, and the rules on relevance of the basic spirit will be just reflected in some of the law. Later, the Supreme People’s court has issued two judicial interpretations (specifically for the question of litigation evidence), in both of them,"relevance (or connection)" began to be used clearly. However, the judicial interpretations made no formal definition of the evidence relevance. In addition, due to various reasons, there is still the problem about the relevance of evidence is that the separation between theory and the practice needs in our judicial practice. In China put the relevance of evidence as a problem to be undertaken discussion is very necessary, and it also is very meaningful.Both the general rules on the relevance of evidence and the rules on evidence of disposition in legislation remains to be further improved in the China’s rules on the relevance of evidence. This paper is divided into five parts,in the first part, the author mainly introduces and reviews the countries of scholars’views about the concept of relevance of evidence and their understandings about the relationship between relevance and other characteristics of evidence, so as to make everyone have a preliminary understanding about the relevance of evidence. In the second part, the author discusses the logical relevance and legal relevance respective, and further reveals the connotation of the relevance of evidence. In the third part, the author mainly discusses the rules on the relevance of evidence, which chooses the rules on character evidence as the focus of discussion in this paper, and briefly discusses the evidence of similar fact which belongs to the rules on extranesous acts evidence. In the fourth part, the author introduces and reviews the legislation present situation of China’s rules on the relevance of evidence. It mainly introduces the deficiencies of current law about the rules on the relevance of evidence in our country. Then, we can seek ways for solving these problems. The last part puts forward a lot of improvement suggestions about the relevance of evidence. This is the key part of this paper. The author put forward their own views on how to improve China’s rules on the relevance of evidence from both the general rules on the relevance of evidence and the rules on evidence of disposition in legislation and procedure respectively.