The Supreme People's Court recently released a notice requiring courts nationwide to uniformly implement the Civil Code in a correct manner.

It requires courts at all levels to fully recognize the profound significance of the Civil Code as China's first and a big achievement of socialist rule of law construction, and carefully do all work related toits implementation.

The courts should coordinate the work of learning and implementing the code with national main task, including regular epidemic prevention and control, optimization of the business environment, dissolution of big risks, precise poverty alleviation, pollution prevention and control, improvement of the socialist market economy, and provision of strong judicial services and guarantees for economic and social development. They also are required to uphold core socialist values when learning and implementing the code.

The notice mentions that the process of learning and implementing the code should promote the modernization of the trial system and capacity and improve the quality and efficiency of civil cases. In addition, courts should include the work of building of one-stop diversified dispute resolution mechanism and litigation system into the code's implementation, so as to continuously improve the capability to use the code to safeguard the people's rights and interests, dissolve disputes and promote social harmony and stability.

Courts should strengthen the code's training and improve its effectiveness with innovative training methods and the results of smart courts' construction. They should pay a lot of attention to learning newly added and updated provisions and combine the new knowledge with trials and enforcement to further improve their capability to perform duties according to law.

In addition, the notice requires to promote the code's publicity through open and live hearings, using judgments to interpret the laws, and releasing typical cases and school activities.

Courts are also required to strengthen trial guidance to ensure code implementation. The SPC should accelerate to clear or sort out existing judicial interpretations and formulate new ones, The high people's courts nationwide must tidy up all related trial guidance documents, meeting notes, cases documents for reference and so on, to ensure all of them are consistent with the code's spirit and stipulations.

All courts nationwide should prioritize the code's implementation, understand their responsibilities and then fully implement them to strengthen civil trials and supervision, especially in the main fields of protection of property rights, personality rights, intellectual property rights and the environment. The courts should carry out in-depth survey and research and carry out consistent adjudication criteria to ensure the code is implemented uniformly and correctly.