Discussion On The System Of Community Tribunal

With the socio-economic transition in China in recent years, various disputes increasingly occur,which is especially in the grassroots judicial practice. At the same time, the types of disputes are more andmore complex, and include more and more new types of disputes such as network infringement and phonefraud. Therefore,“Various cases, few people” has become a common phenomenon in many grassrootscourts. In addition, disputes occurred in the social transformation often involve the changes of people’sideas, social structure, interests distribution as well as the law and policy, so it is often difficult to resolve.The current dispute resolution, especially for the grassroots courts, is facing a severe test.This issue has attacked much attention from the scholars, resulting in a lot of research reports andsuggestions. The judicial practice led by the court has made many actively explore on the judicial capacitybuilding. Particularly on March25,2009, the Supreme People’s Court announced the "Third Five-YearReform Outline for the People’s Courts (2009-2013), clearly stated that to establish and improvediversified dispute resolution mechanisms according to the requirements of “led by the Party committee,supported by the government, participated by multi-parties and propelled by the judiciary”. Then, a waveof “socialization of court mediation” has been occurring in many places around our country. Considered the“community tribunals” launched in Henan Province is rather typical and representative in the socializationof court mediation, and relevant information is more abundant, this paper chooses it as the analyticalsample.“Community tribunal” is a higher organizational form of dispute resolution model. By absorbingsocial forces into the process of dispute resolution and appointing some ordinary persons as the communityjudges, community tribunal not only bring the advantages of mediation into full play, but also satisfy thepeople’s judicial demands. In the meanwhile, community tribunal is in line with the third wave of “accessto justice” around the world, and the way of electing “community judges” to mediate the case adequatelyprotects the parties`choice right in civil procedure and reflects the value of judicial democracy. To somedegree, it can be said that the values of "good governance" has been reflected in the judicial field through "community tribunals " system because it is led by the government and supported by the court and participated by multi-parities, and sets up a communication bridge between the law and society.Of course, community tribunal is a new dispute resolution institution in China, and now it inevitablyencounter sever problems which should be resolved, for example, the lack of special funds safeguard andthe community judges’ skill. In addition, the development of community tribunal and its problems varywidely in our country. The last part of this paper only focus some general problems occurred more often inthe practice, and provides some reform suggestions. However, based on the discussion in this paper, we canbelieve that community tribunal is a vigorous institution of dispute resolution, and it requires “trial anderror” testing in the judicial practice,...