Report on China’s Maritime Judicial Transparency Index (2017) Officially Launched / Shanghai Maritime Court Retained “Most Transparent Maritime Court” Title

On March 22, CASS Law Institute and Social Science Academic Press jointly issued the "Annual Report on China’s Rule of Law No.16 (2018)" (Blue Book of Rule of Law) and the “Report on China’s Maritime Judicial Transparency Index”. Shanghai Maritime Court once again won the title of the “most transparent maritime court”.

In recent years, the Program on Rule of Law Index Innovation of CASS Law Institute has focused on the investigation and evaluation of the judicial openness of 10 maritime courts in China to evaluate the development of maritime judicial transparency. In 2016, Shanghai Maritime Court ranked first domestically with a total score of 77.2 points, and continued to top the list in 2017 with a total score of 91.7 points.

According to the Blue Book of Rule of Law, in 2017, Shanghai Maritime Court has opened its view in judicial openness and released a bilingual version of Shanghai Maritime Court Report on Trials. Also, its English portal runs in a more stable way with more content and more timely updates. Meanwhile, Shanghai Maritime Court has an informative WeChat Official Account with a strong synchronization to its portal and high click-through rate, which deserves to be a successful example.

It is also pointed out in the Blue Book that, in 2017, the first Five-Year Plan of Shanghai Maritime Court and its establishment of China’s first Smart Maritime Court Practice Base were selected as important events of the 2017 China’s maritime judicial openness which received extensive attention from the media at home and abroad and effectively stepped up the engagement of China’s maritime justice internationally.

China has been a big maritime judicial power and is advancing towards a great one, the key to ensure this is to improve the credibility and international influence of China's maritime justice. It is an inevitable choice for China to promote justice by openness, thus setting up its maritime judicial authority and credibility. In order to enable the public to have a more comprehensive understanding of maritime trials, Shanghai Maritime Court actively expands the breadth and depth of justice openness to promote the construction of "justice in sunshine and transparent court" by a tangible and measurable standard and tries to deepen the trial process, promote the information disclosure of judgements and execution, perfect the media of judicial openness and create a matrix of website, micro-blog, WeChat and new media. The measures Shanghai Maritime Court has taken to provide more convenient maritime judicial service is continuing achieving good social response.