Courts responsible for enforcing verdicts, official says

China is taking steps to ensure the enforcement of verdicts in civil cases, and those who have won judgments can rely on the court to help them impose judgments, an official of China's top court said on Thursday.

There long had been no clear rules on how to appeal cases in which the losing sides refused to abide by the verdicts, "although our laws pointed out defaulters, including debtors, should face criminal consequences when they do not carry out judgments," Zhang Genda, deputy director of verdict enforcement bureau at the Supreme People's Court, said during a news conference.

Typically, residents would call police when debtors refused to repay them as ordered by the court, the police would investigate and then prosecutors would follow-up with charges where appropriate, Zhang said.

But sometimes, verdicts were still hard to enforce, he said.

To more effectively prod defaulters to abide by verdicts, the top court issued a judicial interpretation in July 2015 that said residents have the right to appeal to courts themselves if police refuse to take their cases, he said.

"In other words, the way to ask defaulters to enforce verdicts has been diversified. Our courts can not only receive cases brought by prosecutors, but also by residents," Zhang said.

On Thursday, the top court also disclosed six cases in which judgment defaulters were sentenced for refusing to carry out verdicts.

Guo Kecun, a native of Henan province, was sentenced to 30 months in prison in December after refusing to pay back salaries to workers.

A factory boss, Guo had been ordered by a court in the province's Shangqiu city to pay the salaries of 17 workers totaling about 118,000 yuan ($18,000) in January last year.

Guo was detained twice for failing to pay as the verdict required, said Yan Yan, director of the bureau's property enforcement department.

"Local police refused to file the case after the workers reported it, so they came to the court and filed the lawsuit," Yan said. "The court decided to criminally punish him, because of the clear facts and the seriousness of his default."

Although there are no statistics on how many such cases have been brought by residents, they have "accelerated the enforcement of verdicts," Zhang added.