Court portal told to promote China’s judicial openness

Updated : 2015-12-18

China’s official court portal has been urged to adopt “Internet thinking” and make use of information technology and multimedia means to help promote the country’s judicial openness as well as build itself into an influential world-class website.

On June 5, Zhou Qiang, president of the Supreme People's Court (SPC), China’s top court, paid a visit to Chinacourt.org in Beijing.

Zhou praised Chinacourt’s development and contributions in the past 12 years. He called on the portal to better meet the public’s diversified information needs and publicize China’s judicial policies and practices through enhanced services, enriched contents and improved interactive functions.

In the past year, Chinacourt’s effort in new-media applications has played an important role in promoting judicial openness and increasing transparency, Zhou said.

He asked the portal to seize opportunities brought by the mobile Internet and actively meet challenges in order to improve the SPC’s services on the Twitter-like Weibo, the social networking application WeChat and client-side news applications.

He urged the portal to make use of live Webcast, online videos and radio and other means to push ahead with the construction of three platforms for the public to access trial procedures, judicial documents and judgement enforcement information in a comprehensive manner, constantly expand the platforms’ coverage and increase their influences.

Chinacourt was also told to focus more on grassroots judicial work and give full play to social networking functions of new-media applications.

Besides, Zhou said the portal should enhance communication with other media organizations, expand cooperation areas and adopt innovative cooperation models. It should make good use of mini-movies, photo galleries and other popular forms to publicize the enforcement of court decisions, and offer the public more and better litigation services using mobile Internet technologies such as apps. Efforts should also be made to enhance the portal’s opinion function to help promote the rule of law in China.

Zhou also had chats with Chinacourt’s editing, technology and design staff members, and heard reports by the portal’s leadership about the website’s latest developments.

Professor He Renke of the Hunan University gave a lecture on design thinking in the Internet era, during which he made suggestions about improvements on the portal as well as website design and interaction enhancements.