Public legal services more accessible in Ningxia

Northwest China's Ningxia Hui autonomous region has worked vigorously to make its public legal services more accessible, efficient and inclusive for both urban and rural residents during the country's 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20) period. 

Greater coverage 

After outlining the further development of its public legal service system in 2018, the region has been striving to expand the service coverage with offline and online platforms. 

Up to now, Ningxia's offline public legal service network has achieved 100 percent coverage with one regional-level service center, 27 at municipal or county level, 243 at township or sub-district level and 2,809 in villages or communities. 

Meanwhile, Ningxia upgraded its public legal service hotline, 12348, to make it available at any time.    

Besides, through a smart phone-based app and its official legal service website, Ningxia is now able to provide the public with such online services as lawyers, notarial services, judicial authentication and mediation. 

With such inclusive and convenient public legal services, people in Ningxia have learnt to turn to the law instead of the government when encountering legal problems.  

More approachable 

Aimed at bringing legal services closer to the public, Ningxia has stepped up its effort to equip each of its villages with a legal counsel who will serve villagers via WeChat, a popular social messaging app. 

To contribute to the battle against poverty, Ningxia's judicial administration has extended coverage of the legal aid service to all its 239,000 registered impoverished villagers and exempted them from economic status checks. 

In the county of Pengyang, for instance, the local public notary office earnestly helped 1,209 rural families involving 4,730 villagers who were relocated to other places for the purpose of poverty relief with the formulation of their resettlement agreements. 

Over the past five years, the region's judicial administration helped about 90,000 people recover or avoid nearly 1.4 billion yuan ($214.42 million) in financial losses in over 60,000 legal aid cases, obtaining a public satisfaction rate of over 98 percent.   

In addition, the system handled more than 340,000 notarial cases, nearly 5,000 arbitration cases, and over 50,000 judicial authentication cases during the same period. 

The system aims to build a favorable legal environment for the environmental protection of the Yellow River basin and the region's high-quality development during the 14th Five Year Plan (2021-25) period.