Zhou Qiang, president of the Supreme People's Court, listens to a work report at the Intellectual Property Court. (Photo/court.gov.cn)

Zhou Qiang, president of the Supreme People's Court (SPC), called for strong judicial support and services for implementation of the innovation-driven development strategy at a symposium held at the SPC's Intellectual Property (IP) Court on Nov 20.

Since its establishment at the beginning of this year, the IP court, by sticking to the standards of "high starting point, high standards, high level and internationalization", has made remarkable achievements in providing uniform standards for trials and improving their quality and efficiency.

Zhou pointed out that the court has fully functioned in unifying the standards for the trial of IP cases and providing strict IP protection, constantly raised the quality and efficiency of trials, and conducted court management and cultural building in a lively manner, which together has accrued experience conducive to reforms and innovations.

Zhou instructed the court to maximize the functional role of trials and implement the new development concept so as to provide potent judicial services and support for innovation-driven development; to make "the systemic project of unifying trial standards and raising trial quality and efficiency" a major task, improve the work mechanism and summarize more replicable and promotable experience; to keep implementing the selected case strategy and fully mobilize judges' wisdom and entrepreneurship to yield a batch of significant landmark adjudications; to stick to the principle of people-centric justice, actively explore litigation procedure reform, advance the development of a diversified dispute settlement mechanism, explore online mediation and hearings and improve the circuit trial mechanism so as to meet people's varying judicial demands; to improve the diversified technical fact verification mechanism and explore the establishment of diversified special teams for technical fact verification so as to effectively address difficult issues in IP-related litigations; to enhance the application of information technology, press ahead with such information technologies as big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and blockchains so as to continue to make trials more and more intelligent; and to actively advance judicial communication and cooperation so as to raise the credibility and influence of IP protection.

Zhou also emphasized that there is zero tolerance of corruption in the judicial system, and called for the improvement of judges’ expertise through constant academic study.