A Third Party Evaluation Report on the Informatization of Chinese Courts

Since the 1990s, global science and technology has been progressing every single day, with internet and big data having become an important orientation of the times and the most significant characteristics of the global economic society as well. Therefore promoting information development is becoming not only a top concern of the state, but a demanded work for the court. The informatization of courts is defined as an endeavor and process in which the courts take initiatives to upgrade judicial credibility and to uphold legal justice by developing and implementing various types of information systems utilizing information technology in their collection, processing, storage, sharing and exploration of all kinds of information emerging from trials for promoting judicial transparency and justice for the people to the public, and for standardizing the exercise of internal judicial power and improving both the quality and efficiency of court performance. Being an important component of the state informatization, the court informatization is undergoing a profound self-revolution within the judicial system, which is not only transforming the trial mode, but improving judicial capability and optimizing the judicial structure for the construction of an innovative trial mode. And at the same time it serves as an important means to provide better services for the public and to realize the fundamental goal of justice for the people. Therefore, the development of the court information is a key solution for the court to tackle a series of deep-level issues such as how to better achieve social fairness and justice and how to meet the judicial needs of the public in the New Era, being itself an important part of the judicial reform. Recent years have witnessed remarkable achievements in judicial transparency, justice for the people, and the betterment of trial quality and efficiency as well as the standardization of judicial administration, as a result of the great initiatives by the Chinese courts in their construction of the court information network under the guidance of the overall strategy for ruling the country by law, and in accordance with the idea of "Big data, large scale, great service" while striving to provide good services for the people, trial, and judicial administration.