Home demolitions, land expropriation cases seeing more court time

Court cases involving home demolitions and land expropriations made up the largest proportion of lawsuits filed against district governments in Beijing last year, official data show.

A report released on Thursday by Beijing No 4 Intermediate People’s Court said such cases represented 27 percent of all lawsuits last year, up from 13 percent in 2016.

“Some district governments sued in our court failed to disclose information concerning home demolition to residents in a timely manner and failed to explain demolition policies,” said Cheng Hu, the court’s vice-president. “Their improper working procedures resulted in legal disputes.”

He also said some governments did not arrange leading officials to attend case hearings, which did not meet a requirement in the revised Administrative Procedure Law and was not an effective way to solve conflicts with residents.

He suggested district governments make every stage of demolition operations transparent to the public “and try to sufficiently explain related policies to residents whose homes are targeted for demolition”, he added.

The court, established in December 2014 to implement judicial reforms launched a year earlier, is mainly responsible for hearing cases in which any of the city’s 16 district-level governments are named as defendants.

The reforms aim to avoid administrative interference in the legal system.

Thursday’s report said the court heard 1,544 lawsuits filed against the city’s district governments last year. Seventeen percent resulted in rulings favoring the plaintiffs.