A Study On Vice File Publicity Of Chinese Court

Judicial publicity is a basic principle of constitution and law and an important way for the public to be aware of supervise administration of justice and thus publicity and transparency should be guaranteed to lift the mysterious veil of judicature and guarantee the judicial fairness and public trust.As the top priority of judicial reform,judicial publicity is implemented vigorously and its contents and scope in China are extended continuously,from three platform construction,including judgment document publicity platform construction,executive information publicity platform construction and trial procedure publicity platform construction to six publicity,including case filing publicity,document publicity,court trial publicity,hearing publicity,trial publicity and execution publicity.In terms of the current publicity means,online publicity system of judgment document,living and recorded court trial system and news media audit system have obtained good results,meaning that judicial publicity is implemented stably and orderly in China.However,in terms of the disclosed contents,still a part of the items that should be contained in judicial publicity have not been disclosed.The "vice volume" known as "umbrella" is such an existence.According to the existing regulations,the court file is divided into principal file and vice volume;the litigant is allowed to consult the principal file which is open to the public and all the units and personnel are not allowed to consult the vice volume which is not open to the public except for special circumstances.Hence,the confidential property of vice volume makes the vice volume become the "hospice" of materials that can not be open to the public.In juridical practice,the confidential property of vice volume leads to a series of problems,which destroys the judicial fairness and authority and thus the reserving and abolishing or the reform of vice file should be discussed.Actually,some materials in the vice volume may have a strong impact on judicial fairness;however,the vice volume is composed of many charging documents and not all of them are playing such a role;if all the materials in vice volume are disclosed,the judicial authority may be provoked unreasonably and meanwhile unlimited judicial publicity will push too much pressure on our court and may cause unnecessary petition and repeated-appealing which does not confirm to the current judicial environment of China.Hence vice file should be disclosed conditionally on the basis of not undermining the judicial authority and further promoting the public trust.Judicial publicity is not strange to both academic circle and judicial practice circle and there are many articles on judicial publicity.However,few articles are discussing judicial publicity with a view to principal and vice file system.Based on the existing documents,almost no one studies on principal and vice file system besides some reports and articles which are mainly the denouncements of lawyers with no detailed discussions;moreover,the principal and vice file system is a Chinese characteristic with no foreign systems for reference.In addition,the regulations on principal and vice file system are blank in legalization besides some generalized regulations.The author aims to discuss this system in this thesis so as to provide some references for reform of principal and vice file system.In this thesis,random sampling survey is applied to make the sampling analysis and summarize all kinds of court files through combining theory with practice,the materials on claim in vice volume is determined according to the existing regulations and actual situation,whether the charging documents in vice volume should be disclosed is discussed and finally the publicity means of vice volume is conceived.