Top court encourages public to contribute to archive platform

People from various walks of life, including lawyers, law experts and even non-legal entities, are allowed to provide cases for an online archive platform recently established by China's top court, in line with a guidebook.

The guidebook has been published by the Supreme People's Court on Tuesday on its official WeChat account and will come into effect on Wednesday.

The 30-article legal document clarifies what cases can be uploaded in the archive, with specifics on the uploading workflow, in order to help the platform unify verdict-rendering standards and improve judicial efficiency.

While collecting cases from grassroots courts, it also encourages other fields, such as lawyer associations, law academies and non-legal institutes, to provide cases to the platform, stating that all the cases should be reviewed and deemed to have reference value by the top court before being put online.

As a new move to advance judicial transparency as well as a new way to enhance the public's legal awareness, the archive platform for searching criminal, civil, administrative, State compensation and enforcement cases opened in late February.

People can read cases on http://rmfyalk.court.gov.cn to learn what laws were applied and why the courts arrived at their verdicts.

With the adoption of new laws and the application of fresh judicial interpretations, cases uploaded on the platform will be updated in a timely manner to ensure visitors can access the latest and accurate legal knowledge, according to the guidebook.

Data released by the top court on March 9 showed that the archive included details of more than 3,800 cases and had been viewed over 3.27 million times, with 276,000 users from 82 countries and regions registered.