Thoughts On Several Issues Of Juvenile Witness Testimony System

Minors,the special group under immature physical and mental development,are regarded as relatively disadvantaged group compared with adults.Some scholars from home and abroad uphold that minors are not eligible for being witnesses.However,the author believes that the characteristic of minors should not be an obstacle to their qualification of bearing witness.So minors should have the same rights to participate in litigation as adults do.Allowing minors to testify is in conformity with international and domestic trends,and conducive the discovery of case facts.But in China,legislation and judiciary for minors to bear witness are under improvement.The lack of special rules for minor witness qualification,the collection and review for the minor witness testimony in legislation has led to inconsistent operations in practices.The insufficient special protection for minor witnesses does harm to the physical and mental development of minors.In this thesis,the author aims at giving suggestions for the solution of above problems.There are four parts in this thesis.In the first part,the author presents the introduction of the basic principles of Chinese minor witness testimony system.The object studied in this thesis is determined through the definition of of minor witnesses.Through the definition of the connotation of minor witnesses,the author makes it clear that minor witnesses have the qualifications to testify,and puts forward with the special psychological characteristics of minor witnesses that are different from adult witnesses and probes further into the testimony characteristics of minor witnesses.In the second part,the author introduces the current situation,problems and cause analysis of China's juvenile witness testimony system.Based on the analysis of the current situation,the author unveils the problems of juvenile witness testimony system in legislation and practical justice.After that,the author analyzes the causes of the problem with legislative and judicial concepts of strong authoritarianism,highlighting procedures while taking little count of entities as well as objective legislative techniques.In the third part,the author introduces the minor witness testimony system in foreign countries,and concerning the problems in the minor witness testimony system,the author seeks to improve the Chinese minor witness testimony system through the analysis and comparison of the foreign minors testimony system and the Chinese litigation culture.In this way,the author concludes conflict and accordance and takes efforts to find the matching point between the systems of different litigation cultures,with which to improve the Chinese minor witness testimony system through absorbing advantages from foreign systems.In the fourth part,the author integrates the foreign experiences with current Chinese situation to improve the Chinese minor witness testimony system through legislation and practices.In legislation,the minor witnesses testimony system is improved from the following two aspects.The first aspect is the qualification of minor witnesses.In qualifying the minors,the qualification shall be firstly determined,then the content of the qualification,the third the disagreement and review of the qualification.The second aspect is enacting special rules for the collection and review of minor witness testimony issued by the Public Prosecution Law.In practice,the minor witnesses testimony system is improved from the following four aspects: first,to improve the minor protection system;second,to improve the appropriate adult system;third,to improve the minor witness testimony collection process,the fourth is to improve the minor witness testimony review process.There are still some problems in the current minor witness testimony system in China,whether it is at the legislative level or the judicial level.Solving the current problems not only meets the China 's criminal legislation requirement "basing onfacts and adhering to the principle of judging by evidence",but also conforms to the trend of the international society which is to protect legitimate interests and rights of minors.