Pressure builds for court losers to obey verdicts

The problem of enforcing court rulings resulting from lawsuits — the top public complaint following litigation — has been eased to a large degree after various measures designed by China’s top court over four years were put in place.

The latest statistics released by the Supreme People’s Court on Tuesday show that more than 9.59 million case outcomes in which people did not comply with rulings had been made public by the end of 2017. Released in the online disclosures is information about the defaulters, including their names and identity card numbers.

The “blacklist” is considered one tool to improve the country’s credit system, established in 2013. It tries to pressure defaulters into compliance, and by December 2016 more than 580,000 had followed court verdicts, according to Legal Daily.

In 2014, the top court shared the blacklist with eight other authorities, such as the Ministry of Public Security, in a move to further encourage defaulters to obey verdicts quickly by adding “difficul- ties” to their daily lives.

So far, 9.36 million flight trips and 3.67 million highspeed rail trips were prevented as a means of pressure, Tuesday’s statistics show. Defaulters are not entitled to such forms of travel.

“What we want is to make sure each verdict is implemented efficiently and pressure added to the defaulters, inconveniencing their daily lives,” said Zhou Qiang, the top court’s president.

In October 2016, Liang Wenjuan, from Chifeng, Inner Mongolia autonomous region, found herself stranded in Sichuan province, as the entertainment manager was named on the blacklist and she was not allowed to purchase a seat on a flight.

She did not obey a ruling in which she was ordered to keep up repayment of a bank loan in 2011. But once she found she could not get home, she quickly asked one of her employees to deposit the money with the court, bringing the five-year case to an end.

In another case, Zhu Najuan, 59, who refused to pay 25 million yuan ($3.8 million) to her business partner in line with a court verdict, was found in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, in July.

“She even had a face-lift to escape the ruling,” said a judge responsible for the case in Wuhan, Hubei province. “But thanks to the information sharing and joint efforts among judicial authorities, she was criminally detained for allegedly refusing the verdict implementation.”

As the pressure against defaulters is being increased, judicial officials’ behaviors in pushing forward the verdict enforcement have been regulated. In one guideline issued by the top court in March, juvenile information is not allowed to be posted on the blacklist.

What we want is to make sure each verdict is implemented efficiently and pressure added to the defaulters.” Zhou Qiang, the top court’s president