Study On China Judicial Committee System And Its Reforming Strategy

Judicial committee system in Chinese contemporary courts was formally established after the founding of new China,which is a unique system in Chinese courts and cannot be found in either Anglo-American law or civil law countries.As part of China's judicial system and a system in the court,judicial committee system is a judicial decision-making mechanism that is composed of a number of people with democratic centralism as the principle and exercises collective leadership,and its purpose is to decentralize and assign the judicial authority to a number of people to regulate and constrain the power.As can be seen from the history of Chinese judicial system,this judicial system was established in ancient China in such power distribution mode(joint trial system),which was inherited by later revolutionary regimes to establish various judicial committees.It can be said that the establishment of the judicial committee system in China is the inheritance and development of similar systems in history.The emergence and development of these systems had specific cultural background and ideological basis,so the ancient joint trial system was rooted in China's social and economic conditions and natural environment,which embodies the influence of substantive justice and careful punishment in the ancient Chinese legal culture and tradition.Various judicial committees in the new democratic revolution period inherited the beneficial elements in the ancient legal culture and combined with the essence of the western advanced legal thought,especially the Marxist-Leninism legal thought.Since the 1950s,with the continuous establishment and development of courts at all levels,judicial committee system has been gradually improved and perfected and increasingly played an important role in managing and leading the trial.There is no perfect system in the world,for the system operation is accompanied by the problems of the system itself,which are continuously found and solved.The process of problem finding is often reflected in the theoretical study of the system,and problem solving is the process of system improvement.The theoretical research on the judicial committee system can be summarized into two big clues,one is the conflict between theoretical research and political stand,and the other is the interaction between theoretical research and system improvement.In this way,the research and debate on the judicial committee system can be classified into two main periods,one is political stand-oriented prudent exploration period characterized by the ideological language(after the founding new China and before of the late 1980s),and the other is bold exploration period marked by Deng Xiaoping's talk during inspecting the south in the context of judicial reform and from the perspective of judicial independence(from the early 1990s to now),which can be divided into two small periods with the outline of the first five-year reform promulgated by the Supreme People's Court as the boundary,scholar-based period and judge(or court)-based period.Regardless of prudent or bold exploration,a point of view throughout all the articles is that the judicial system,the unique judicial system of China,needs to be reformed urgently and the way of reform includes mechanism reform within the system and institutional reform outside the system.With regard to the continuity or abolishment of the judicial committee system,the views of the two sides are opposite but their footholds are no longer confined to the exploration of the reform of judicial committee system itself(especially the view in the bold exploratory period)but has extended to the judicial system reform and the macro-proposition "how to achieve independence".These studies and arguments have prompted the reform of judicial committee system and even the start and deepening of judicial system reform,and some of these proposals have been involved and adopted in the subsequent judicial system reform.In line with the theoretical research and debate on the judicial committee system,the court has also continuously improved the system.This process can be broadly divided into two periods,one is tortuous development period after the founding of new China to the 19802,and the other is deepened reform period from the early 1990s to now.The process of system operation and reform is sufficient to show that as a mechanism for regulating and restricting the jurisdiction(mainly for major and difficult cases)in a manner of collective decision-making,so the judicial committee system will not be completely canceled but further improved.In the context that the judicial system reform has entered the top-level design,because the judicial committee system occupies an important position in the court trial,its reform will continue to attract attention.After two decades of continuous improvement,there are still some issues on the reform of judicial committee system that need to be clarified,such as whether the macro-direction function of the judicial committee system is really weakened,whether the discussion function should exist to determine the case,whether the scope of case discussion can be further narrowed,whether it is reasonable to only discuss law application,and the assessment and management of judicial committee members.As can be seen through the analysis of the above problems,the reform of the judicial committee system itself has a lot of limitations in the function positioning,case discussion contents and personnel management,some of these limitations are the reflection of the problems of the whole court management system in the judicial committee system,such as weakening of macro-direction function and personnel management,and others are not suitable for the uniform reform design,such as definition of case discussion content.Therefore,in addition to the reform of the judicial committee system itself,more attention should be paid to the supporting reform outside the system.On the one hand,the internal management structure of the court should be adjusted,including the reorganization of internal decision-making and enforcement mechanism(both administrative decision-making and enforcement mechanism and judicial decision-making and enforcement mechanism),and reform of other various judicial organizations in the court.On the other hand,it is the reform of the overall management mechanism of the court system,which includes a number of elements involved in the top-level design of new-round judicial reform,such as separate sequence management of judge,establishment and improvement of judge selection and promotion mechanism,and vertical management of court finance.Of course,there is room for further improvement in the judicial committee system,especially for the detailed problems such as deliberation principle for the case,number of participants in the on-site judicial committee and votes,and norms and improvement of online judicial committee system.