Professional Ethics of Chinese Judges

On October 18th 2001, the Chinese Supreme People’s Court issued the Code of Conduct for Judges in the PRC (the Code) , which makes China one of the few countries in the world with a specific code of conduct for the judiciary. Following the amendment of the Law on Judges in June 2001, the introduction of the Code was an important event, and one that illustrated the continued efforts of the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) to improve professionalism among judges. The promulgation of the Code can be looked at from two angles. Inwardly, it is a natural development in court reforms that began more than a decade ago. In the 1980s court reform started with a change in the trial mechanism of local courts to overcome the inability of the courts to handle the increased number of civil and economic cases resulting from the economic reforms. Since then the SPC has taken the leading role in furthering and widening the reforms, to cover trial proceedings, the enforcement of judgments, the reorganisation of the internal bodies of the court, the management of judges, etc. These changes relate to the trial system, institutional reorganisation, and the granting of more autonomy to judges. It is becoming obvious that reform measures cannot be efficiently implemented without an improvement in the professional quality of judges. Judicial professionalism demands both the competence of judges to adjudicate cases according to law and to a high standard of morality and conduct to ensure that judge