(To be completed) Chinese Legal System - A Glance
Only for your reference, not an legal advise.
Not completed yet.
The purpose of this article is to give a quick introduction on the legal system of China to my fellow students at NUS Law. I have several chances to explain Chinese legal system to some of my friends orally. I think now it is the time to write those words down.
I believe writing this article is helpful for me as I have a chance to re-thinking the overall legal system of China. Also I hope that this article will be of some help for anyone who need a brief introduction on the legal aspect of China.
法院系统 / Court System
There are 4 levels of courts in Mainland China jurisdiction, from top to buttom are:
- Supreme Court (1 nationwide)
- High Court (1 in every province)
- Intermediate Court (on average every prefecture level city like Chengdu, Guangzhou)
- District Court (1 every county/city district level city)
The court system is seperated to 3 branches: Civil, Criminal and Administrative.
In general, every case only has one appeal chance. A few kinds of cases do not allow any appeal. Another exception is that every death penalty case is to be reviewed by Supreme Court .
No suprise, there is no constitutional court in China.
Constitution Law
A very fun fact is that the Constitution Law of China is not applied in any court system, which means provisions of Constitution will not directly be cited as authority in any judgement.
One popular explanation for this is that the provisions in the Constitution are too abstract to apply in every case, and they are already concretized by other laws. Therefore there’s no need to fall back to the Constitution.
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