Legal experts have hailed a plan to set up a juvenile court this year in Guangzhou that will exclusively hear minor cases.

They claim the move will better safeguard juvenile's rights and interests in the southern Chinese municipality.

The juvenile court is an independent judicial body, different from the 2,500 juvenile courts nationwide affiliated with ordinary courts, said Wu Yaoguang with the Guangzhou Intermediate People's Court.

The new court will not only hear criminal cases committed by offenders under 18, it will handle civil and administrative disputes involving minors, Wu added.

Actually, the Supreme People's Court proposed last September setting up juvenile courts in order to protect the rights and interests of minor offenders.

Besides Guangzhou, three other cities -- Shanghai, Nanjing and Harbin -- will set up such courts on a trial basis, Supreme People's Court officials said.

Shanghai opened the country's first juvenile court in 1984 to differentiate cases against minors from those faced by adults. Today, more than 7,200 judges hear juvenile cases across the country.

However, legal experts point out that such courts only handle criminal cases, while the number of civil cases involving children's support and minors' educational rights have soared in recent years.

Statistics show that more than 60,000 civil cases related to minors are handled yearly.

The problem is that these cases are heard through Civil Law in the same way as adult cases, and sometimes fail to address children's special interests, said Chen Jianmin, president of the juvenile court at the People's Court in Changning District in Shanghai.

"An independent court may help solve such problems," Chen said, explaining that such a juvenile court, specializing in all cases involving minors, can give full consideration to their rights and interests.

Li Daomin, president of the High People's Court of Central China's Henan Province, said the number of young offenders keeps growing. Chinese police arrested nearly 70,000 juvenile delinquents last year, up 12.7 per cent from 2002, according to the Supreme People's Court, accounting for 9.1 per cent of the total criminal suspects arrested.

Li said there is an essential difference between juveniles and adults in committing crimes -- a harsh sentence most often hardens a teenager into a life of crime, rather than serves as a deterrent.

"Corrective guidance best reforms troubled youth, so judges should not give simple punishments to young offenders, but help them reform themselves and resume a normal life," said Li.

However, the power of current juvenile courts is very limited and can hardly meet the huge demand of providing overall judicial protection for minors, Li noted.

He said children are different from adults developmentally and young offenders have their particular needs, it is a must to set up independent juvenile courts.

Besides setting up juvenile courts, Chinese justice departments are also probing some new methods to better help young offenders in rehabilitation.

One of the most common operations nationwide is to suspend verdicts and permit youngsters to continue their studies or work in a certain period of time. This is often decided on the basis of their performance during incarceration.

Shanghai and Beijing also have launched a community service programme for teenage offenders last year, rather than having juveniles serve jail time.

(China Daily June 21, 2004)