CASS Center for the Study of National Indices of the Rule of Law and the Innovation Project Team on Indices of the Rule of Law of CASS Law Institute, Assessment Report on the Construction and Application of Version 3.0 of the People’s Court Informatization System (V3.0): from the Perspective of Informatization of Courts in Shandong Province, Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 2017.

The Five-Year Plan for Information Construction at People's Courts (2016—2020), adopted by the Supreme People’s Court in February 2016, provides for specific requirements on the construction of Version 3.0 of the People’s Courts Informatization System. According to the plan, people’s courts throughout the country must complete a total of 55 tasks of informationization construction, which are divided into four main categories, within the five-year period. This report analyzes the results achieved by China in the construction and application of Version 3.0 of the People’s Courts Informatization System from the perspective of the informatization of people’s courts in Shandong Province.

The informatization of people’s courts in Shandong Province has undergone three stages of development: all-round initiation, integration and upgrading, and upgrading to version 3.0. In this process, the courts have achieved remarkable results in such aspects of informatization as full coverage, mobile connectivity, cross-border integration, in-depth application, transparency, convenience for the people, safety, and controllability, and are endeavoring to upgrade the system from the current version 2.0, which takes interconnection as its main characteristic, to version 3.0, which takes “smart court” as its main characteristic.

With respect to practical method, people’s courts in Shandong Province have attached high importance to top-level design, strengthened the construction of court website, Open Cloud, technological court and other infrastructure constructions, and provided comprehensive services to parties to litigation through such mechanisms as on-line handling of cases, electronic delivery, and automatic generation of electronic case files. And their practices of attaching importance to data management and carrying out wisdom innovation are also commendable.

With respect to the approaches to informatization, people’s courts in Shandong Province have adhered to the people first principle, laid emphasis on the cultivation and enhancement of Internet thinking and the increase of imformatization literacy, and, in light of the double-skin phenomenon and the tendency of laying stress on construction at the expense of application in informatization construction in some localities, given prominence to high-degree integration of judicial work and technology, and endeavored to ensure that informatization is truly able to perform the functions of servicing all parties to judicial proceedings, facilitating the exercise of rights by all parties, providing intelligent assistance to the court in the trial, helping courts overcome difficulties in the enforcement of judgments, and promoting the refinement of judicial administration.

To promote the further development, both in depth and width, of informatization, people’s courts in Shandong should continue to raise the level of application of informatization in accordance with the requirement of constructing smart courts by taking servicing the public as the orientation, meeting the need of operational application as the standard, raising the capacity of data governance as the goal, and the relevant safeguarding mechanisms as the support.