Reforming the Criminal Evidence System in China

Since 1997, China has proposed to reform the judicial system. In 2007, China officially set its goal of judicial reform as to “establish a Socialist Judicial System with fairness, efficiency and authority”. Now that the goal of judicial reform has been firmly established, the key question is how to accomplish that goal. One view advocates achieving judicial reform through administrative measures. A different path, which we proposed, is to accomplish the goal of judicial reform through reinforcing the construction of evidence system. Through analyzing the current law and investigating some judicial cases, the study found that the main reason for issues of judicial unfairness and corruption in current China is due to neglect of the construction of evidence system, and the current evidence rules contain too many problems, and the aforementioned problems have become a bottleneck for China's judicial reform and an important reason for China to reconstruct the whole evidence system. Therefore, in the long run, it would be ideal for legislature to promulgate a unified code of evidence law, but it is an extremely difficult task to coordinate the relationship between evidence law and three major procedural laws. In the short term, the most feasible compromise is to have the Supreme People's Court promulgate People's Court provisions on Evidence. After repeated test through the trials, we believe that such a unified People's Court provisions on Evidence will dramatically improve the evidence system and promote judicial fairness and the reform of legal education in China.