China says courts struggle to meet people's demands

BEIJING (Reuters) - China confronts a big gap between citizens' rising demands for legal protection and a court system struggling with inefficiency and poorly trained judges, the top judicial official said on Monday.

In his annual report to parliament, Xiao Yang, the president of China's Supreme People's Court, listed achievements courts had made in past five years, but said serious problems remained.

"We must also soberly understand that there remains quite a stark contradiction at present between people's constantly growing demands on the judiciary and the abilities of the people's courts," he told parliament.

Under the ruling Communist Party, there is no independence for the courts, prosecutors, police or judges, who answer to local party chiefs. But China's citizens are becoming increasingly vocal about their rights and in calls for accountability.

Xiao said "the legal environment" needed to be improved continuously to give more independence to courts, which are funded and effectively controlled by local governments.

"We should ... repel all kinds of disruption to ensure the people's courts can hear cases independently, fairly and according to law," said Xiao, who has been lauded by Chinese media as reform-minded in his 10 years as Supreme Court president.

Xiao said that in 2008, the focus of the courts would be on severely punishing perpetrators of major crimes, while protecting human rights and ensuring citizens received a fair hearing.

Over the past five years, Chinese courts have dealt with 1.2 million cases of violent crime, including murder, kidnap and robbery, which Xiao said was a rise of 10.1 percent over the previous five-year period.

Reforms that China introduced to the death penalty review process in 2007 were "operating normally", Xiao said, but he gave no specifics on numbers of executions.

Rights groups estimate that China executes between 8,000 and 12,000 people a year, the highest rate in the world, but it has slowly been reforming the system after several high-profile wrongful convictions aroused public anger.

Last year, the Supreme Court took back its power of final approval over death penalties, which had been relinquished to lower courts.

In a separate report, chief prosecutor Jia Chunwang said his office had made strides in fighting corruption and abuse of office by officials.

In the 2003-2007 period, the Supreme People's Procuratorate investigated 42,010 officials for abuse of office. Of those, 16,060 were convicted. But the number of official corruption cases investigated, such as embezzlement and bribery, from 2003-2007 was actually down 13 percent from the previous five-year period, according to Jia.

Jia also said there had been a dramatic drop in the number of citizens kept in detention beyond the lawful period while they were under investigation, from nearly 25,000 in 2003 to 85 incidents in 2007.

Jia said 2,451 people were prosecuted for state security crimes and 1,193 officials were charged or probed for their role in, or covering up, work safety accidents in the past five years.

Xiao and Jia, both 69, are expected to retire next week when the parliament session closes.

(Additional reporting by Guo Shipeng; Writing by Lindsay Beck; Editing by Nick Macfie)