The Supreme People's Court (SPC) recently issued a guideline on strengthening and standardizing the work of jurisdiction escalation as well as retrial and arraignment in a bid to optimize the working mechanism, improve the check and supervision mechanism based on the four-level court system, and reinforce guidance on trial practices.

The guideline clarifies the specific situations, criteria, procedures, and supportive mechanism where a case is eligible to be transferred to a higher-level court for trial or enter a retrial, so that higher-level courts can fully tap their roles of unifying legal application, promoting litigation-source governance and preventing external interference by handling the transferred case.

The guideline further improves the procedures of case jurisdiction transferred to a higher level and of retrial, and issues relevant legal document templates, based on pilot practices in the reform on the duties of the courts at four levels. The SPC and higher people’s courts need to strengthen supervision, management, and guidance, and to improve incentive-based assessment and outcome materialization mechanisms where the demonstrative significance, guidance to lower-level courts, effectiveness of source-litigation governance and public feedback are taken as key assessment criteria, to ensure that the reform measures are implemented and effective in courts at all levels, according to the guideline.