Lawyers kept out

Li Ying from the center of the Peking University said the difficulties in public interest litigation lay in the process of getting courts to accept the case and getting the verdict implemented.

Supporting women's land interests in the countryside has become a major part of the work of the center with more land interest conflicts arising from the accelerating expropriation of farmland for construction. When Li Ying and the director of the center Guo Jianmei went to Huizhou of Guangdong Province to represent a group of married women who had lost their land on marriage to men not from their own village in a farmland shareholding reform, the plaintiff and lawyers were kept out of court - judges told them that lawsuits concerning land interest in the shareholding farmland reform would not be accepted as civil litigation by any court in the province. This greatly reduced legal access to women unfairly treated in the wide-ranging reform in the economic powerhouse province which ranks top in land prices.

A judge of Huicheng District Court, who received Li Ying and Guo Jianmei, based the refusal to accept the lawsuit on requirements of a new circular issued by the Supreme Court, but he failed to produce a written document or legal basis.

"It is clearly stated in the Law on the Protection of Women's Rights and Interests that women's farmland and residence land are protected by law after getting married or divorced, so from the legal perspective, it made no sense to refuse our litigation," said Li Ying. She said the financial means of these women as well as those of their offspring would have been reduced to nothing if they lost their land, the only stock in the shareholding reform.

In the end, the village did back off, but not because of the law but owing to the intervention of the Huicheng District Government. According to Li Ying, the district government took the case seriously only after they threatened media exposure of the illegal practices, which would have damaged the city's image and sabotaged its bid for national city status.

In a similar case represented by lawyers of the center in Hohhot, the capital city of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, 28 women won the litigation for land compensation, but failed to get it enforced even one month after the ruling was delivered. The desperate women, who started to pursue their legal interests in 2002, climbed onto the roof of a six-story residential building and launched a 78-hour sit-down protest in blistering heat.

These women got the first lot of compensation at the end of November, five months after winning their case. The final resolution, in this case too, was pushed by the governments at the township, district and city levels.

"The difficulty in implementing the court's ruling is more a social problem than a problem of the legal system," said Zhou Ze, an associate professor at the China Youth University of Political Sciences.

Li Ying said China still lags behind in the rule of law as compared to Western countries. "Before the authority of law is thoroughly set up in society, forces outside the legal system must be rallied to support the disadvantaged group in public interest litigation,'' she said.