Zhou Yongkang, a member of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee Political Bureau, has called for providing the poor with better legal aid services and helping protect their legal rights and interests.

Although China's economy is sound in general, the country has faced difficulties in development due to the current global financial crisis, said Zhou, who is also head of the CPC Central Political and Legislative Affairs Committee, at the Fifth National Conference on Legal Aid Tuesday.

The senior official urged judicial departments, legal aid institutions, lawyers associations and major non-government organizations to participate in the efforts to provide them with better legal aid services. Efforts must be made to make it affordable and accessible for the poor to use judicial services, he stressed.

At the meeting, the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) announced that the country will set up more legal aid centers in collaboration with government and non-government organizations, so as to help the poor to resolve their problems, timely and in a more rational manner.

The new measure, together with the other nine, constitutes a package of rules MOJ launched this month to make the legal aid services more affordable and offer more convenience. Other measures are varied from letting more people enjoy more kinds of free legal services, to standardize legal aid office shop fronts for easy recognition, publicizing the legal assistance hotline, simplifying the service procedure, and accepting social supervision.

China's legal aid system, starting from 1994, has seen great improvement in recent years. Last year, more than 4.3 million people received legal consultation through legal assistance in nearly 550,000 cases, registering a 30 percent annual rise since 2003. Legal-aid spending at various government levels rose 30 percent year-on-year over the past five years and hit 670 million yuan (about 98.5 million U.S. dollars) in 2008, according to the minister.

Under present regulations, legal aid institutions cannot operate on a for-profit basis. Migrant workers, disabled and minors are regarded as the people who need legal aid most, as they have been frequently reported to have unfair treatment and had little money to go through legal procedures.

"Judiciary departments have worked together to ensure the financial support of the work and set up inter-departmental cooperation mechanisms since 2004," said Wu Aiying, minister of justice, giving out the fact that so far, 19 provinces established their own legal assistance funds.

At the conference, 102 units and 100 individuals were awarded prizes for their meritorious work in legal aid.

Source:Xinhua

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