To promote meticulosity in meting out capital punishment, top judge Xiao Yang said Saturday that Chinese courts will start from this year to open court session when hearing death sentence trials in second instance, after taking steps to retrieve the power of death penalty review from provincial courts.

"As of July 1, 2006, all the second-instance trials of death sentence cases shall be heard in open court,"" Xiao, who is also the president of the Supreme People's Court (SPC) said in his report on the work of the Supreme People's Court.

Complaints against Chinese judiciary take down turn

Local courts across China received a total number of 3,995,244 letters, visits and calls of complaints in 2005, down by 5.33 percent year-on-year, and 435,547 of them were against misconducts of judges, the country's top judge said in Beijing on Saturday.

"The number of complaints against courts and court staff that had been rising for years began to drop for the first time last year," said Chief Justice and President of the Supreme People's Court Xiao Yang.

China puts 6 provincial-level officials into prison

In the fight against corruption and other duty-related crimes, Chinese local courts heard 24,277 cases of embezzlement, bribery and dereliction of duty, and sentenced 1,932 officials above the county level to prison, Chief Justice Xiao Yang said Saturday.

"Of the convicted, six were provincial or ministerial officials, 178 were prefecture level officials," said Xiao, president of the Supreme People's Court, in his report to the annual session of the Tenth National People's Congress.

Chinese courts sentence 10% more to prison

Chinese Chief Justice Xiao Yang said in Beijing Saturday that local courts across the country heard 683,997 criminal cases in 2005, 6.17 percent up year-on-year, and sentenced 844,717 cases, or 10 percent more, to prison.

Chinese judiciaries take steps to ensure innocent free from being wronged

Chinese courts and prosecuting organs at various levels have taken a series of measures to ensure that the innocent be free from wronged punishment, according to work reports of top judge Xiao Yang and top procurator Jia Chunwang on Saturday to the Parliament.

"Chinese courts at various levels strictly followed the principle of meting out penalty to the guilty in accordance with the law, and setting the innocent free in time, and pronounced 2,162 criminal defendants innocent in year 2005," Xiao, Chief Justice and the President of the Supreme People's Court (SPC), told the ongoing session of the Tenth National People's Congress.

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China clamps down on rampant piracy in 2005

In a stepped-up fight against piracy, China's courts sent almost three thousand people to jail for violating intellectual property rights (IPR) last year.

Courts handled 3,567 criminal cases and 16,583 civil cases involving IPR violations last year, Sun Huapu, spokesman of the Supreme People's Court, said at a press conference held on Friday.

Conditions not ripe for China to abolish death penalty: spokesman

China, for the moment, does not have the right conditions for abolishing capital punishment, said spokesman Sun Huapu of the Supreme People's Court at Saturday's on-line meeting with visitors of two top Chinese websites.

In reply to netizens surfing the Xinhuanet.com and the GOV.cn, which is the website of the Chinese central government, the spokesman made it clear that China is among the more than half of the nations in the world that have insisted on the death penalty, which has drawn criticism from others. It is a global trend that the controversial practice will be gradually reduced until it is abolished in the whole world, he said.

Judicial work must live up to people's expectation

Ying Yong, president of Zhejiang Provincial High Court in east China, has been very busy these days ever since the annual session of China's parliament convened in Beijing on March 5.

Ying, who is attending the session as a non-voting observer, hopes to collect suggestions and even criticism from deputies to the Tenth National People's Congress (NPC), so that the judicial work in his province could be improved step by step to the satisfaction of the broad masses.