중국의 소액소송제도 소고

Abstract

In order to improve the efficiency of the small claims judgment, reduce litigation costs, and to alleviate the contradiction of having an insufficient amount of judges between the people's courts, the amendment of the small claims system in the "Civil Procedure Act (2012)", was established for the first time. The amendment of the “Civil Procedure Act(2012)” chapter13(XIII) summary procedure, article162 is defined that the judgment of first instance shall be final if the amount of the subject matter is lower than 30 percent of the previous year’s average annual wages of workers in a province, autonomous region or municipality directly under the Central Government, and if “the facts are clear, the relations of rights and obligations are definite”, the adjudication of the basic people’s court or detached tribunal shall be final. After the execution of the amendment of the “Civil Procedure Act (2012), each basic people’s court works on positive levels in many ways for the small claims system. Each region of the higher people’s court strives to standardize ‘small claims system’ as the norm and standard. The higher people’s court also made definite regulations about the small claims system. For example, they enacted a guide of small claims system, made a scope of small claims applications, trial organizations, trial methods and terms of case. Moreover, in time they will promulgate the amount in controversy of small claims cases. However, because the small claims systems are not complex and do not prescribe an independent procedure, each people’s court in a civil trial has a low intensity of using the small claims system. Furthermore, it is very hard to apply this standard of the small claim’s application scope. Even if the small claims system is forced to be applied on the first trial as the final trial, it still shows a lack of usual specific procedures. Therefore, there still remain many problems of the small claims system amendment. Both the person directly involved and the judge feel burdened using the system. Yet, with the small claims system, it is still difficult to rationally separate the complicated cases and the simple civil cases, and reduce the people’s burden of a trial. Under the abundant amount of small claims trial experiences, the People’s Supreme Court legislated and proclaimed the judicial interpretation of the revised Civil Procedure Act on January 30th, 2015. The scope of small claims applications, trial methods, conversion of the proceeding, and the simplification of trial documents are concretely defined in the revised Act. The judicial interpretation of the revised civil Procedure Act has been in operation since February 4th, 2015. In the future, in order to vitalize the small claim system, trials ought to positively prosecute and standardize the system through the regulation of the revised Civil Procedure Act.