China establishes over 560,000 physical public legal service platforms

As of the end of 2020, China had established 566,000 physical public legal service platforms at five administrative levels ranging from province to village, according to the Ministry of Justice.

In 2020 alone, these platforms provided various kinds of services more than 18 million times. 

In the meantime, the country's public legal service hotlines handled 8.77 million phone calls. Its online legal service platforms received over 120 million visits last year.

Progress was also made in the notarial service reform with the steady promotion of the mode of cooperative notary institutions. Seventeen notary offices of this kind had their applications for establishment approved last year. 

As of the end of 2020, there were 13,000 notaries and 2,800 notary offices in the country.

Last year, in order to improve the quality and credibility of China’s judicial authentication services, the ministry divided the services into the three categories of forensic medicine, physical evidence, and audio and video materials.

It also established and improved a system for recording and reporting interference with the judicial authentication work and the system managing the court appearance of authenticators.

By the end of 2020, there were 3,100 judicial authentication institutions and 38,000 authenticators in China.

Chinese lawyers also increased their participation in social governance. As of the end of 2020, there were more than 8,600 lawyer-operated mediation studios and over 49,000 lawyer mediators in China. 

Last but not least, 2,368 county-level areas had already started piloting full lawyer coverage of their criminal cases by the end of 2020. As a result, the number of related legal aid cases around the country reached 591,000 last year.