Courts keep up with needs of international cases

Shanghai's courts have fully supported the law enforcement of Belt and Road countries over the past three years, the Shanghai People's High Court said on Sunday.

To resolve problems caused by the inconvenience of overseas evidence and facts collection and the differences in national legal systems, the courts in Shanghai fully respects the right of the parties to choose the applicable law, integrates the resources of all parties, and broadens the ways for looking up foreign laws.

In one of the typical cases released by the high court, Shanghai No. 2 intermediate People's Court gave assistance to a Belarus court to execute judgment about alimony payment for a divorced couple in which the person subject to enforcement lives in China.

Meanwhile, the high court released guidelines for local courts to set up diversified working mechanism on lawsuits, mediation and arbitration of commercial cases related to foreign affairs.

Services such as looking up articles on foreign laws, translation and notarization are also available.

Also, the Shanghai Maritime Court signed a special cooperation agreement on foreign law identification with the East China University of Political Science and Law and Shanghai Maritime University. This establishes a foreign law search platform covering maritime laws of major shipping countries over the world, and set uniform working rules for foreign law identification.

The agreement has been used for successfully investigating the laws of Mexico, Greece, Brazil and other countries in many cases.

From 2018 to 2020, local courts had accepted a total of 2,463 foreign-related commercial cases involving Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.

The parties' judicial needs for foreign law investigation have been increasing year by year, and the laws required to be investigated have become more sophisticated and complex, said Mao Haibo, deputy chief judge of the high court's commercial court.