Chinese courts have made substantial progress in enforcing judgments over the past year thanks to the roll-out of a new efficiency focused program, a representative of the Supreme People's Court (SPC) told a news conference on July 3.

Since the SPC piloted the initiative of cross-enforcement across 19 provincial-level regions in October last year, judgments of 72,843 cases have been handled, where 23,119 have made substantial progress or been resolved and 39.9 billion yuan ($5.5 billion) have been delivered to winning parties, according to Huang Wenjun, head of the Enforcement Department of the SPC.  

Cross-enforcement is an innovative method adopted by the people's courts to enforce judgments of major, difficult and complex cases, as well as long-standing unresolved ones. It ranges from enforcement under supervision and enforcement under instructions, to enforcement by higher authority, centralized enforcement and collaborative enforcement.

This pioneering approach to judicial enforcement has enhanced the overall quality and efficiency of enforcement work, said Huang.

From January to June this year, the enforcement departments of courts across the country handled 24,828 registered cases raised through letters and complaints and made substantive progress in 12,702 of them, accounting for 51.16 percent of the total.

The SPC released details of a number of typical cross-enforcement cases at the news conference, including the biggest intellectual property case in enforcement amount since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, a financial loan contract dispute between a bank and a hotel in Shanghai and a labor dispute in Suzhou, east China’s Jiangsu province.