The end of a lawsuit may signal the start of more work

For many people, winning a lawsuit signals the end of a dispute. However, according to judges from enforcement bureaus, the courts still have much work to do even after a verdict has been delivered.

Compared with judges responsible for hearing cases and making rulings, Wang Jinxin's job at Beijing Haidian District People's Court is to guarantee that rulings are truly carried out.

"Put simply, I'm the one pushing guilty parties in lawsuits to follow our court's orders, such as returning money or paying compensation," Wang said.

He regards trial as the last mile on the road to justice, adding that verdict implementation is the last 100 meters before the finish line.

"After all, what many litigants care about after a court rules in their favor is whether they can get back the money involved in the case. That's the real or practical interest for them," said Wang, who has worked for the court's enforcement department for about 10 years.

He said he has been pleased with the changes made in the field of enforcement in the past decade, taking them as his motivation to move forward.

"When I started the job, there were few regulations or guidelines to tell courts how to prompt people to comply with verdicts, so I had to make my own efforts to find defaulters and their assets," he recalled, adding that it took a lot of time.

"I wrote a list of defaulters' names and identity card numbers, then went to banks to ask them to help me locate savings in accordance with the list," he said. "Usually, I visited those banks once every two weeks, or once a week if the list was very long.

"I also had to go to the motor vehicle management bureau as well as the industry and commerce commission, because defaulters may have had different properties."

The time-consuming searches did not change until the Supreme People's Court, China's top court, signed agreements with a number of banks, financial institutions and government agencies in recent years calling on them to share information with courts online.

Additionally, many courts are now dealing with enforcement-related cases via teamwork. "That means a single judge need not do everything in the search for defaulters and their assets," Wang said.

He praised the online platform that has made his searches more efficient, but noted that there has been rapid growth in the number of enforcement-related cases as a result of the country's rapid economic development in the past decade.

Wang said the number of such cases he has dealt with rose to 1,448 last year from 410 in 2011. Meanwhile, statistics show that the Haidian court handled 45,044 cases last year in which people applied for verdict enforcement. In 2011, the figure was 12,375.

In Wang's opinion, the online information-sharing system means more interested parties－such as government departments, banks and financial institutions－are attaching greater importance to verdict implementation, while the rising number of related cases indicates that people's awareness of protecting their legitimate rights has also been enhanced.

When Wang was asked whether he feels sad that he cannot make verdicts like some of his classmates at law school, he responded, "of course not" without hesitation.

"We have different roles in the court, but our goal is the same－to ensure justice is done," he said.