On the last day of 2024, the Supreme People’s Court issued an urgent notice (Fa Ming Chuan [2024] No. 173), requiring courts nationwide to fully implement the new elemental indictment and defense statement templates starting from January 1, 2025. This announcement has caused quite a stir, sparking widespread discussion within the legal community.
What Are Elemental Indictments and Defense Statements?
Simply put, traditional indictments and defense statements are like writing a short essay, where one writes directly on a blank sheet of paper, either typed or handwritten, as long as the content is clear. In contrast, an elemental indictment is like filling out a form, where one fills in each item on a given template according to their situation, ensuring every section is completed.
Since this notice requires court filing departments to provide elemental indictments when transferring case materials to trial departments, it effectively mandates that parties must provide elemental indictments during the filing process.
| Filing Type | On-site Filing | Online Filing |
|---|---|---|
| No Indictment at Filing | Guide the party to fill out the elemental indictment on the People’s Court Online Service Platform; or guide them to fill it out online using self-service devices in the hall. | Directly fill out the elemental indictment on the People’s Court Online Service Platform and import it into the case management system. |
| Using Elemental Indictment at Filing | Import the paper or electronic version of the indictment into the case management system through scanning or intelligent recognition (original documents are simultaneously uploaded for archiving). | Import the electronic version of the indictment into the People’s Court Online Service Platform through intelligent recognition (original documents are simultaneously uploaded for archiving). |
| Using Traditional Indictment at Filing | Same as the “no indictment” guidance method (original documents are simultaneously uploaded for archiving). | Guide the party to directly fill out and supplement the elemental indictment on the People’s Court Online Service Platform (original documents are simultaneously uploaded for archiving). |
What Are the Benefits of Replacing with Elemental Indictments?
For the courts, promoting the replacement with elemental indictments offers several clear advantages:
- Using Standard Data Structures Facilitates Court Digital Transformation
In the past year, one of my responsibilities has been to promote the application of a cross-departmental data information system for criminal cases. This initiative requires the comprehensive digitization of all elemental information in criminal cases starting from the investigative phase by the police. This way, the standardized electronic data can seamlessly flow from the police case management system to the procuratorate’s case management system. After the procuratorate completes its processing, the electronic data can continue to flow into the court’s case management system. Ultimately, once the court concludes the case in the trial business system, it can send the criminal information to the prison or other penal enforcement departments with a single click. The entire process requires all case elemental information to be processed in the same data format. Any change in the data structure at any point could disrupt the entire chain.
The same applies to the civil litigation field with elemental indictments. Without a standard format, even using generative AI for analysis might not extract the key elements effectively.
- Comprehensive Elemental Templates Prevent Parties from Omitting Key Information
Traditional indictments, although courts provide suggested templates (as seen in the first example), many parties prefer to write freely according to their own ideas. Especially some older individuals, who enjoy writing lengthy, handwritten indictments, detailing various personal experiences but often missing the point regarding the case itself. Most critically, traditional indictments do not prompt parties on what needs to be written and what can be omitted, making it a skill typically mastered only by lawyers. Consequently, cases where parties represent themselves often encounter issues like unclear claims, omitted key information, and contradictory content. This not only troubles judges but also puts the parties themselves at a disadvantage. Elemental indictments eliminate such hassles; one only needs to fill out the form from start to finish, making the content very clear.
- Standard Templates Eliminate Regional Differences
A common criticism of the court system has been the varying requirements for case filing across different regions and courts. For example, some courts require plaintiffs to provide a copy of the defendant’s ID (such as for Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan residents) at the time of filing, while others do not. However, the new elemental templates only require plaintiffs to provide their own identification information, and none of the templates require filling in the defendant’s ID number, which is undoubtedly a step forward. Although in practice, plaintiffs may face some difficulties if they cannot provide the defendant’s ID information, the fact that the Supreme Court’s template does not require this should alleviate some of the hassles at the filing stage. Additionally, many local courts previously created their own unique templates to prevent false litigation or other issues, causing headaches for lawyers who had to modify well-prepared indictments when filing in different courts.
- Uniform Format Facilitates Litigation Supervision
In recent years, courts nationwide have handled an overwhelming number of cases, leading to frequent instances of “different judgments for similar cases” due to regional and judicial differences. Supervising these cases using traditional manual methods is almost unfeasible. Previously, without elemental forms, extracting key information from these cases required manually reviewing each case file, which was highly inefficient and made it difficult to identify issues. The introduction of elemental indictments is significant for promoting the use of big data supervision models in civil litigation. Both internal court supervision and external prosecutorial supervision can now accurately monitor the judicial process through the analysis of elemental data, marking a crucial foundational step in strengthening civil litigation supervision.
What Are the Negative Impacts of Replacing with Elemental Indictments?
Overall, the introduction of any new system involves a period of adjustment. Elemental indictments and defense statements were proposed as a reform trial by the Supreme Court, the Ministry of Justice, and the National Lawyers Association in March 2024 (Fa [2024] No. 46). After nine months of practice, it appears that the court system has already reaped significant benefits from this system, prompting the nationwide implementation three months ahead of the originally planned one-year trial period.
However, for the parties involved, there is still an adaptation process, and potential risks are worth noting.
Although elemental indictments and defense statements may resemble filling out forms at banks or government offices, the former directly affects one’s litigation rights, while the latter is merely a necessary part of the process. Filling out the former incorrectly could lead directly to losing a case or other adverse effects on legal rights, whereas errors in the latter might only require re-filling a form or restarting the process.
Filling out elemental indictments and defense statements involves many legal terms, which may increase the difficulty for parties without legal representation during the filing process. However, this difficulty is minor compared to the disadvantages of poorly written indictments. After all, in Chinese litigation, achieving the desired outcome is paramount, and taking the time to consider all details carefully is not necessarily a bad thing.
The introduction of elemental indictments and defense statements will increase the pre-litigation service pressure on courts. Unlike forms at banks or government offices, these forms cannot be resolved by simply providing examples. They require clear explanations to the parties about the potential consequences of each form item, possibly even requiring audio or video recordings to prevent future disputes.