Deeply participate in the resolution of contradictions and disputes, and give full play to the effectiveness of litigation source governance.
Figure 1: Year-on-year increase in the number of civil and commercial cases received by Huzhou courts in the first instance from 2018 to 2020.
Figure 2: The pre-litigation settlement rate of contradictions and disputes in Huzhou courts from 2018 to 2020 (Note: calculation formula: number of successful pre-litigation cases/number of civil and commercial cases received in first instance (excluding special procedure cases)+number of administrative cases received in first instance)
Core Tip: As the birthplace of the "Fengqiao Experience" in the new era, in recent years, the provincial party committee has focused on deepening the construction of the center for mediating and resolving social contradictions and disputes, comprehensively integrating all kinds of dispute resolution resources, actively promoting the reform of "running at most one place" to resolve contradictions and disputes, and effectively building a complaint source governance system with Zhejiang characteristics. As an important participant in the reform of "running at most one place", how the people’s court can effectively promote and guarantee this reform deserves in-depth study. To this end, the Intermediate People’s Court of Huzhou City, Zhejiang Province set up a research group to conduct a special investigation on the relevant work of Huzhou City Court in actively participating in the construction of social contradictions and disputes mediation and resolution center and comprehensively promoting the source of complaint management in the past two years.
I. Basic information
Huzhou court actively participated in the construction of mediation and settlement center for social contradictions and disputes (hereinafter referred to as Maodiao Center), deeply integrated one-stop diversified dispute settlement and litigation service system construction into the "one place at most" reform, and promoted the construction of litigation source governance mechanism from three dimensions: non-litigation governance, non-litigation settlement and litigation termination. Since fully participating in the construction of the Diaodiao Center in 2019, the number of civil and commercial cases in the first instance has decreased year by year, the rate of resolving contradictions and disputes before litigation has been continuously improved, and the source of litigation has achieved remarkable results (see Figure 1 and Figure 2).
1. Adhere to active integration and fully implement judicial settlement. First, the complaint service center settled in full coverage. Since 2019, Huzhou court has fully implemented and completed the litigation service center of grass-roots courts to settle in the county-level spear transfer center as a whole. By the end of 2020, a total of 87 court litigation staff had settled in the county-level spear mediation center, and 40 mediators originally attached to the litigation center had been introduced into the county-level spear mediation center. The second is to standardize the service of the resident team. Huzhou Intermediate People’s Court took the lead in issuing the "Guidelines on the Standardization of the City’s Courts’ Participation in the Construction of County-level Contradictory Dispute Mediation and Resolution Centers" in the province, clarifying the requirements for the entry of grass-roots courts’ complaint service centers, that is, at least three teams, including civil and commercial case filing, mediation quick trial and administrative dispute mediation, were set up, and eight categories of personnel, including neutral assessors, procedural diverters and mediation instructors, were equipped to construct basic process specifications and realize the standardization of entry work. Third, the people’s courts are all in the same state. Give full play to the advantages of the court in deepening the grass roots and resolving conflicts on the spot, integrate the optimized layout of the court with the construction of the spear adjustment center, and implement the overall settlement of the court and the mechanism of the county and township spear adjustment centers. At present, two courts have been stationed in the county-level spear transfer center as a whole, two courts have been stationed in the township-level spear transfer center as a whole, and other courts have been stationed in 72 township-level spear transfer centers in a mechanistic way, achieving full-scale entry into two-level spear transfer centers.
2. Strengthen front-end prevention and control, and strive to promote non-litigation governance. The first is to carry out the project of connecting judges with villages. The village communities in each jurisdiction will be integrated according to factors such as regional location, industrial structure and dispute characteristics, and the system of judges joining villages will be fully implemented. The 278 judges of the courts in the city will sink forward, and 589 village communities in 180 areas will be docked to directly participate in the grassroots prevention and control of disputes. The second is to promote the construction of village communities without litigation and visits. Strengthen the linkage with the judicial, petition and other departments, jointly promote the construction of "villages (communities) without litigation and visits", and actively create typical models by means of judges’ joint village, so as to realize a virtuous circle of declining disputes, declining letters and visits and improving the comprehensive social governance capacity. The third is to promote the improvement of the grassroots governance assessment system. We will help the party committees and governments to include the litigation rate of thousands of people in towns and villages, the amount of contradictions and disputes resolved, and the construction of "no litigation and no visit to villages (communities)" in the safety assessment. The assessment results are directly linked to the evaluation and bonus of towns and villages, and the county-level spear adjustment center will undertake relevant assessment responsibilities and play a central role in social governance.
3. Pay attention to coordination and continue to strengthen non-litigation resolution. The first is to build a one-stop diversion model. The court’s resident team actively promoted the county-level Maodiao Center to build a one-stop platform integrating the functions of dispute acceptance, diversion and resolution, analysis and judgment, established the criteria for dispute identification and diversion, defined the organization and hierarchy of dispute resolution, and realized the accurate matching of disputes and dispute resolution resources. The second is to improve the package dispute resolution network. We will help all kinds of special mediation committees and other forces to settle in, and introduce characteristic platforms such as intellectual property judicial protection center and administrative dispute mediation center into the spear mediation center to realize the interconnection of dispute resolution resources and build a comprehensive and integrated dispute resolution network. In the past two years, 6,693 teams have settled in the county-level spear mediation center to participate in mediation and guidance. The third is to create an integrated closed loop to resolve disputes. Strengthen the connection between online and offline platforms, with the help of Zhejiang ODR online mediation platform led by the court, and connect dispute resolution resources in different regions and levels in series, and build an "O2O" dispute resolution model based on the Maodiao Center, that is, realize the closed loop of dispute resolution of "offline window acceptance, online registration circulation, offline collaborative resolution and online feedback of results". In the past two years, the Maodiao Center has solved more than 20,000 disputes through ODR diversion every year.
4. Improve the trial and execution mechanism, and effectively guarantee the end of litigation. The first is to optimize the judicial confirmation mechanism. We will expand the scope of confirmation by adding specially invited mediation subjects, lifting the restrictions on the amount and level of jurisdiction, and try out the judicial confirmation mechanism of administrative disputes and interest litigation strike agreements. For two consecutive years, the number of judicial confirmations increased by more than 15% year-on-year, of which 2,892 were confirmed through online judicial confirmation; The second is to improve the complicated and simplified diversion mechanism. Promote the center to establish a non-controversial fact recording system for pre-litigation mediation, and record the mediation situation in writing as a reference for quick adjudication and quick trial. We will try to judge the complexity of mediation cases, realize the connection between pre-litigation mediation and the identification of complexity and simplification of litigation, and try and resolve simple cases on the spot. In 2020, 10,417 civil and commercial cases were concluded on the spot by the fast-cutting team, accounting for 36.93% of the newly accepted civil and commercial cases. The third is to highlight the deterrent effect. We will introduce the court-resident segmented execution mechanism promoted by the city’s courts into the Maodiao Center, and use the resources of the center to improve the efficiency of checking people and finding things and ensure local execution. Actively build a "public prosecution as a supplement, private prosecution as the main" to combat the high-pressure situation of refusal. In 2020, the city accepted 323 cases involving refusal, ranking first in the province.
Second, the existing problems
1. Conceptual cognition needs to be deepened. In practice, there are still some different understandings and views on the implementation of the integration of the litigation service center into the county-level spear mediation center and the introduction of a large number of court resources. They think that the integration of the court’s work is separated, resulting in the poor connection of the court’s internal working mechanism, losing the court’s initiative in the construction of the litigation mediation docking mechanism, which is contrary to the original intention and purpose of one-stop multi-disciplinary dispute resolution and the construction of the litigation service system.
2. Shunt filtration needs to be improved. As the command center for resolving contradictions and disputes, Maodiao Center should establish a scientific and accurate mechanism for identifying contradictions and disputes, diverting them and filtering them layer by layer, so as to realize the resolution of disputes from the front end to the back end. Although the three-level hierarchical mechanism of village community, town street and district and county has been initially distinguished under the guidance of the court at this stage, there are still contradictions and disputes that are not unified in nature, dispute resolution resources are not fully included in the diversion category, and the docking mechanism between levels is not perfect.
3. Typed prevention needs to be strengthened. Although the contradictions and disputes entering the litigation have been declining with the strengthening of the source of litigation in recent years, the types of cases such as road traffic, property management, finance, marriage and family affairs still account for a high proportion in the litigation, mainly due to the lack of front-end prevention and control mechanism, insufficient mediation power, lack of professionalism, and insufficient coordination between individuals or organizations, resulting in poor prevention and control effects of typed disputes.
4. The sinking of trial execution needs to be strengthened. The purpose of moving forward and sinking the judicial enforcement force is to play the role of the judiciary in safeguarding the prevention and control of contradictions and disputes at a more advanced stage. Although the judicial power is promoted to extend to the grassroots by the way of the court entering the township spear mediation center and the judges joining the village, the key areas and ways of participating in prevention and control still need to be clarified, and the role of the carrier such as the judge’s studio still needs to be further played, and it should be more closely coordinated with the grid workers and village mediators.
5. The level of intelligence needs to be improved. The construction and operation of smart courts should not be limited to litigation, but should extend more application scenarios to the front-end prevention and control of contradictions and disputes, integrate with the intelligent platform of the Diaodiao Center, and push judicial services to the front with intelligent technology. In some courts, the judicial guarantee for the front-end prevention and control of contradictions and disputes and the docking with the grassroots dispute resolution forces still rely more on offline, and only partial limited collaborative integration can be achieved under the series connection of relevant platforms of the Diaodiao Center.
Third, countermeasures and suggestions
1. Constantly enhance the initiative of overall settlement. We should deeply understand the significance of the leadership of the Party Committee in deepening the governance mechanism of the source of complaint, and really mobilize all resources to fully realize the overall governance of the source of complaint. Under the leadership of the Party Committee, the construction of Maodiao Center, as the main starting point to promote the governance of litigation sources, is completely in line with the one-stop modern litigation service system in terms of value pursuit and goal orientation under the guidance of the concept of "running at most one place". Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen the determination of judicial resources such as the litigation service center and the court to settle in, coordinate the overall work of the court, and constantly improve various working mechanisms based on the two-level Maodiao Center.
2. Continuously enhance the scientific nature of shunt filtration. Further establish the central position of diversion and filtration in county and township level Maodiao Center, and integrate all regional dispute resolution resources into the diversion category of Maodiao Center. Give full play to the professional advantages of the court, strengthen the construction of the comprehensive diversion window, and define the types of disputes with reference to the court’s rules of cause of action, so as to solve the problem of unclear rules of cross-departmental diversion caused by different subjects’ different definitions of disputes. On the basis of accurately classifying the types of disputes, the rules of diversion are refined, and disputes are filtered step by step from villages, towns, districts and counties to achieve a high degree of matching of resources and ensure clear rights and responsibilities and clear paths.
3. Continuously enhance the polymerization of the spear tuning center. To comprehensively promote the integration, allocation and coordination of dispute resolution resources in Maodiao Center, the court should play the role of "adhesive" and "serial device", strengthen the rational use of resident, rotating and on-call resident modes, and improve the docking mechanism between the court and various dispute resolution resources; In view of the high-incidence types of disputes, we should increase the traditional forces such as people’s mediation and industry mediation, improve the protection of people and property, pay attention to promoting the marketization level of lawyer mediation, notary mediation and other ways such as government purchasing services and clarifying market-oriented charging rules, improve the prevention and control mechanism of typed disputes, and realize the comprehensive aggregation of dispute resolution resources around the two-level spear center.
4. Continuously enhance the systematization of trial and execution. Adhering to the concept of "treating the disease at the back end and preventing the disease at the front end", we should further rely on entering the two-level spear mediation center, give full play to the function of the court’s tentacles, deepen the project of connecting judges with villages, strengthen various measures of connecting villages, such as publicity of the rule of law, joint visits, guidance of village rules and regulations, pay attention to the combination with the grid governance mechanism of village communities, cultivate leaders in the construction of village communities’ rule of law, and establish a three-member prevention and control system of "judges+mediators+grid workers"
5. Continuously enhance the intelligence of judicial guarantee. Enrich and move forward the functions of various intelligent platforms under the leadership of the court, take Zhejiang ODR platform, the only platform that can directly connect with the court’s trial and execution platform, as the online main platform for dispute resolution of the Diaodiao Center, realize the online series connection of all dispute resolution resources, promote the intelligent diversion of disputes, create a "dispute resolution code" module, and form a five-color code to record the dispute resolution information and identify the dispute resolution level with color changes. We will build an online judicial service platform that integrates the functions of rule of law propaganda, online litigation, evaluation, and blockchain deposit, and cooperate with the judge-village joint mechanism to achieve full coverage of all village smart terminals and effectively meet the judicial guarantee needs of grassroots dispute prevention and control.
(Member of the research group: wangyi Xiang Jiong Shen Jie Yun Zhu Wang Yuwen Guan Fusheng Shi Jiafang Meng Yin)