Improving environment

Enhancing public awareness of legal issues and getting authorities up to speed with the changes will help the rollout of the latest judicial reform, an official of the Supreme People's Court said.

The moves to push for the judicial reform, raised by the central government in November, have been viewed as providing a clear direction for Chinese courts to explore legal areas such as building intellectual property tribunals and hearing environmental cases beyond the administrative regions where such cases occur.

Tribunals for hearing intellectual property disputes have already been set up in Beijing and Shanghai as well as Guangdong province to help improve the professionalism of the legal sector, according to the five-year plan (2014-2018) of Chinese courts.