China will start a new round of campaigns to boost legal awareness
this year.
The new program,
which will go on until 2005, aims to improve legal knowledge
among leaders, judicial and administrative officials, students
and entrepreneurs, said Xiao Yishun, director of the Department
of Legal Publicity under the Ministry of Justice, in an interview
with China Daily.
Xiao's department,
the major designer of the new program, has already come up
with detailed plans for each series of subjects for the program.
According to Xiao,
the new programme will help improve and expand the current
practice under which leaders attend lectures on laws. Another
part of the new program is to popularize the practice which
encourages leaders to seek for legal consultation prior to
decision-making.
Since 1999, Northeast
China's Jilin Province has hired legal consultants who have
not only provided legal services for the government but also
have advised it on legal matters. The ministry intends to
spread the practice to other parts of the country.
Efforts will also
be made to introduce training and examinations on legal knowledge
for civil servants, Xiao added.
Supervision of
the work of judicial and administrative officials is expected
to be enhanced over the five years with mechanisms that allow
effective investigation of malpractices, he said.
As China has become
a more market-oriented society, business-related laws and
regulations will become a focus during the public legal awareness
campaign over the next five years. Particular attention will
be given to legal knowledge related to the World Trade Organization,
which China is expected to gain membership this year, said
Xiao.
China first launched
its public legal awareness program 15 years ago to restore
the notion of the rule of law among its people after the havoc
of the "cultural revolution" (1966-76). The legal
system was virtually defunct during those 10 years.
During a January
national meeting, Zhang Fusen, the newly-appointed minister
of justice, spoke highly of the just-completed round of public
campaigns, saying that the breakthrough achievement was made
with the shift from simply spreading legal knowledge to imbuing
the public with the notion of the rule of law.
Statistics from
the Ministry of Justice indicate that more than 10,000 leaders
above the provincial level took part in lectures on basic
legal knowledge over the past five years and 30 of China's
31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities have officially
made the implementation of the rule of law a major goal in
their work.
(China Daily 02/01/2001)
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