Be more open, gov't told
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One of China's most respected think tanks called on the government to increase transparency in its agencies and raise the credibility of judicial departments.
The Beijing-based Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) Thursday issued the Annual Report on China's Rule of Law 2011 in which it analyzes the country's legal environment in 2010.
The academy said that China should focus this year on strengthening the supervision of those in power, preventing corruption and punishing those who are involved in it. It also called for better monitoring of State property.
The report pointed out that the government did a poor job last year of disclosing information to the public, especially when it came to government spending.
Twenty-seven government departments under the State Council created a system for disclosing government budgets, or fewer than half of 59 departments surveyed.
Some major channels used to disseminate information, including websites of governmental departments, are still weak, the report said.
"Some of the websites of local government departments have not been updated on a timely basis. The last news on some of these websites are from 2007," Tian He, the executive editor of the report said at a news conference Thursday.
The report said that disclosure of information related to food safety issues were particularly poor.
The country dealt with 130,000 food safety cases last year, including 115 criminal cases, and arrested a total of 248 people, the National Food Safety Regulating Work Office, the food safety authority, said earlier this month.
The legal environment for criminal defense in the country still needs to be improved, the report said.
A study by CASS on cases handled by a county level procuratorate found that more than 70 percent of criminal cases were not challenged by a defense.
The academy found that only 6.3 percent of people surveyed said they were satisfied with the overall quality of criminal defense.
Meanwhile, about 60 percent of lawyers and judges said that the legal environment is "not so good."
"One of the key ways of building up a better criminal defense legal environment is to establish a public defender system," Ji Xiangde, a researcher on law-related issues at CASS said in a press release.
The report also tackled issues such as the social security system, the rising unemployment level as well as pressure from foreign countries to lower the country's interest rate.
The report called on government to implement macro policies to control prices and maintain stable development.
