A Study Of Perfecting Chinese Judges’ Selection System

Professionalization of judges is required by modern judicial system, also the direction offuture judicial reform of China. Refinement of the selection mechanism of judges,fundamental and crucial for management of judges, is significant for professionalization ofjudges. A scientific and scrupulous mechanism of selection of judges should be favorable toimproving the professional capacity of judges, enabling courts and judges to exercise thejudicial power independently and fairly in accordance to the law, and maintaining judicialauthority and public confidence in the judiciary. Many serious problems still exist in thecurrent system compared to this standard. For instance, the qualifications of selection is tooloose to serve as a screen; the methods of selection is crude and there is lack of methods inconformity with judicial rules; the current system, highly administrative, results in thedilemma that when a excellent judge is promoted, he would get fewer cases to directlyhandle. The system related to judges always matches the historical heritage of a state, thestage of economic development and popular view of people, and when the foundationchanges, the system should follow it. In the context of the current state of the country, thelevel of economic development and the political regime, it is urgent to refine our selectionmechanism of judges, which is both a effective way to improve the professional capacity ofjudges, and a necessary step to further better our socialist judicial system. The article pointsout that to refine our selection system of judges, firstly, stricter qualification of judgesshould be adopted, which should be in direct proportion with the level of thecourt,guaranteeing that the power of adjudication is vested in highly qualified legalprofessionals; secondly, a multiple-approach selection mechanism should be developed, inwhich judges in a higher court mainly come from courts below, or from a public selectionopen to public to take more qualified legal professionals in; thirdly, a scrupulous process ofselection should be developed to improve transparency of judges selection and publicconfidence. Of course, the system of judges selection should be treated as a whole andrequires supporting systems such as the mechanism of specified number of personnel, themechanism of grades, and the mechanism of training, supervision and guarantee.