China's top judge and president of the Supreme People's Court, Wang Shengjun, is delivering a report on the work of the Supreme People's Court Tuesday afternoon at the Second Session of the 11th National People's Congress (NPC).

Following are the highlights of Wang's report, the text of which was distributed to the media before the opening of the third plenary meeting of the annual parliamentary session:

Trial in 2008

-- The Supreme People's Court dealt with 10,553 cases of various types and concluded 7,725 cases, an increase of 29.53 percent and 24.2 percent, respectively, year-on-year. Chinese courts handled 10.71 million cases of various types, up 10.91 percent.

-- Chinese courts concluded 768,130 criminal cases. A total of 159,020 criminals were sentenced to death, life imprisonment, or more than five years in prison, accounting for 15.79 percent of all criminals having been sentenced.

-- Chinese courts concluded 286,221 labor dispute cases, up 93.93 percent; concluded 576,013 cases involving medical service, housing, and protection on consumer's rights, up 45.08 percent.

-- Chinese courts concluded 1.14 million cases concerning financial disputes, real estate disputes, company share-holding reform, transfer of stock ownership, foreign-related and maritime disputes, up 15.24 percent; concluded 21,674 market disruption cases involving fund accumulation fraud, illegal absorbing of public deposits, and producing and selling substandard food and drugs, up 13.48 percent.

-- Chinese courts concluded 27,876 intellectual property right infringement cases, up 32.58 percent.

-- Chinese courts concluded 3.17 million civil cases through mediation, accounting for 58.86 percent of total civil cases.

-- The Supreme People's Court reviewed and handled 36,727 major cases involving letters and calls. Proportion for cases involving letters and calls that went into prosecution procedure dropped 49.74 percent.

-- A total of 55,681 people's jurors attended the trial of 505,412 cases nationwide, with the number of cases up 34.05 percent year-on-year.

Work in 2009

-- to provide judicial guarantee for steady and relatively fast economic development;

-- to safeguard social harmony and stability and cultivate good legal environment for economic and social development;

-- to safeguard people's well-being and focus on solving major problems directly related to people's interests;

-- to put forward reform in the judicial system and work mechanism to safeguard social equity and justice;

-- to improve political awareness and competence of judges.

(Xinhua News Agency March 10, 2009)