The Supreme People's Court is to issue a judicial interpretation of property laws to stem increasing land disputes.

Three years after China's rural land contract law was introduced, the judicial interpretation, due September 1, is to clarify areas of the law around which conflicts have arisen, it was announced yesterday.

"The promulgation of the interpretation is aimed at helping the country's 900 million farmers resolve land contract disputes as well to provide judicial grounds for the courts in dealing with such cases," Huang Songyou, vice-president of the supreme court, said on Friday.

People's courts at all levels deal with disputes relating to land contracts, land management, transfer and inheritance, as well as conflicts regarding compensation for farmers who lose their land, according to the 27-article interpretation.

This is the first judicial interpretation the supreme court has drafted since the law on rural land contracts was adopted by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, the nation's top legislative body, three years ago.

Ji Min, a senior judge with the supreme court, said the interpretation will have significance in promoting agricultural development, increasing farmers' incomes and maintaining social stability in rural areas.

China began adopting a contract responsibility system based on household management in rural areas more than 20 years ago. Under the system, farming households struck contracts with rural authorities to use and manage land for their own benefit.

According to Huang, in recent years, some local authorities arbitrarily shortened the terms of contracts and changed the ownership of land-use rights through administrative decrees.

"Devoid of legal protection, the number of land contract dispute cases and complaints by farmers kept rising," Huang said. "The violation of farmers' rights in contracting land even escalated into violence in some places."

One recent dispute occurred in Dingzhou city in North China's Hebei Province, where a bloody conflict over a land contract on June 14 led to the deaths of six villagers, reports said.

To address this problem, the interpretation stipulates that ownership of land use may not be illegally taken back or changed before the expiration of an existing contract.

If land use has been illegally contracted to a third party by the contractors, it should be returned to the farmers who had initially signed contracts with the rural authorities, it says.

If the contractors forced the farmers to transfer the land-use rights to a third party, the courts should grant the farmers' request to abate the transfer of contracts.

Farmers in Dingzhou won back their land, which was illegally transferred to a State-owned power plant by a villagers' committee two years ago.

However, one issue the interpretation does not cover is how to decide the validity of a farmer's membership in collective economic organizations as it applies to the basic civil rights of the farmer, said assistant judge Xin Zhengyu, a major drafter of the interpretation.

Xin said that as a result, "the supreme court has raised a suggestion to the NPC Standing Committee to draft out legislative interpretations of relevant regulations."

(China Daily July 30, 2005)