China's online mediation platform shows promising results, top court says

A total of 13.6 million disputes were handled on China's online mediation platform since it was established in February 2018, with a success rate of 65 percent according to the Supreme People's Court.

To save more people from the trouble of going to court, the top court expanded its online mediation platform by connecting to all courts across China, and 32,900 mediation organizations and 165,000 mediators have participated in online mediation through the platform.

"Now, an average of 66 disputes are mediated on the platform every minute on weekdays, and 17,000 cases per day, which means every two seconds on average a case is successfully mediated," said Qian Xiaochen, head of the case filing tribunal with the SPC.

Qian made the remarks at a news conference on Thursday, when the top court announced with the online platform continuing sound progress, a one-stop dispute settlement and litigation service system has been basically built.

"Through our efforts on online disputes settlement, courts around the country have integrated their dispute resolution functions into the grassroots via local mediation centers, which settled a large number of disputes where they happened," Qian said.

Apart from dispute settlement, 3,501 courts in China have connected to a mobile litigation services program called Mobile Micro Court, which can provide multiple legal services, including evidence filing, mediation, litigation and document delivery.

"In 2020, courts across the country received 10.8 million cases online, which accounted for 54 percent of first-instance cases nationwide," Qian said.

According to the top court, the program provides legal services 24/7, and statistics showed about 10 percent of the cases the courts received in 2020 were in non-working hours.

Over 50,000 lawyers have registered to a website for them to access litigation-related services, which was established jointly by the top court and the Ministry of Justice on Jan 14 to help reduce costs of case handling and improve judicial efficiency.

At present, lawyers had handled 323,000 cases through the website, according to Qian.

For elderly people who are not familiar with the internet, the top court also opened a hotline number, 12368, which received 2.31 million calls in 2020.