Zhou Qiang, president of the Supreme People's Court (SPC), called for more efforts in judgment execution to serve COVID-19 epidemic prevention and control and socioeconomic development.

Zhou made the remarks while presiding over an enlarged meeting of the SPC Party committee on April 24. The meeting was held to analyze courts' work on judgment execution in the first quarter of 2022, hear statistics report on case filing, online mediation and petitioning, and make work plans for the next step.

According to statistics, courts across the nation witnessed a year-on-year decrease in the number of accepted cases and a year-on-year increase in the number of concluded cases in Q1 of 2022. All indicators posed a sound momentum of stability in execution work.

Zhou acknowledged the efforts by all courts in promoting the judicial reform and the development of smart courts, which have laid a solid foundation for accomplishing the execution task for the whole year. He emphasized that courts nationwide should act on the general principle of pursuing progress while ensuring stability, give full play to the functions of trial courts and advance high-quality economic development, social governance and rights protection.

Efforts are needed to consolidate the achievements of one-stop service mechanism and make the alternative dispute resolution mechanism a preferred choice, so as to resolve disputes at the source in a diversified and tangible way, Zhou stressed. More needs to be done to include more authorities in the connectivity system of online litigation and mediation and reinforce diversified dispute resolution in key areas such as finance, people's livelihoods and marital affairs, he said, adding that courts should maintain the order of epidemic prevention and control according to law, crack down on epidemic-related crimes and help to relieve the pressure of market entities affected by the epidemic via judicial measures. Judicial guarantee for people's livelihoods should be strengthened by reinforcing judgment execution on related cases, Zhou noted.

Zhou also called for efforts to facilitate the construction of a unified national market where various kinds of market entities are equally protected by law, regardless of types and sizes of the enterprises and their sources of funds, promote the healthy development of financial market, strengthen judicial protection on key core technologies and original innovative achievements, stimulate innovation, and achieve self-reliance in science and technology. Efficient data sharing and orderly data development and utilization are also needed to serve the development of digital economy and the construction of a digitalized government, he added.

Furthermore, the judicial reform and the development of smart courts need to be further intensified to achieve a modernized trial system and trial capacity, according to Zhou. The judicial accountability system needs to be fully implemented and the SPC’s role needs to be fully tapped in standardizing law applications and promoting judicial justice, he said. The development of smart courts needs to be fully propelled so as to achieve more intelligent, integrated and coordinated services for the people and the judges, Zhou said, adding that judicial corruption needs to be cracked down with zero tolerance to ensure a clean judicial force.