(Beijing) – China's judicial system is set to restart a program to recruit judges from the ranks of lawyers and academics in a bid to boost capacity, but legal experts say it with have little appeal if authorities fail to deal with bureaucratic problems besetting the courts.

The Central Politics and Law Committee, the ruling Communist Party's top authority on domestic security and judicial matters, has drawn up a proposal laying out rules for courts to select established lawyers and legal academics to serve as judges.

The document has not been released to the public, but the law committee had the Ministry of Justice and China Law Society, a bar association, hold a symposium recently so legal professionals and academics could give their input.

The plan is another attempt by the authorities to tap into the growing pool of lawyers and academics as part of improving the judicial system – one that has not worked, academics who attended the symposium said.

Most of the country's judges are former policemen or retired army officers who have few legal qualifications. In recent years, judges are increasingly graduates with university degrees who entered the judicial system via civil service exams, but even they lack much experience.

The courts have been under intense scrutiny recently. In December, the Inner Mongolia High People's Court admitted that it wrongly convicted a young man, an admission that came 18 years after he was executed.

The man, Qysiletu, was executed for murdering a woman at a textile factory in the regional capital Hohhot in April 1996 after a hastily arranged trial at the Inner Mongolia Intermediate People's Court. Some of the evidence was based on confessions obtained via police torture. His family began to appeal for justice in October 2005, when police caught a suspect who confessed to murdering 10 people, including a woman at the same factory.

Over the years a consensus has developed among court officials and legal experts that the professionalism of the courts needed to be improved. In response, the authorities have tried to convince lawyers and academics to become judges.

In 1999, the Supreme People's Court, the country's highest court, drew up a plan for improving the judicial system over the 2001-2005 period. Then, in June 2004, the then president of the top court, Xiao Yang, announced a recruitment drive.

Xiao said that graduates of law schools would be better served if they started their careers as lawyers so they could gain the experience needed to one day be a judge. "We're also calling upon veteran lawyers of good character, reputation and wealth to join the courts,” he said at the time. Recruiting lawyers would help prevent corruption because good attorneys have already earned their money, Xiao reasoned.

The top court reaffirmed its commitment to this approach in later reform plans, but only a small number of lawyers have become judges, said Chen Haiguang, vice president of National Judges College, a university in Beijing that trains judges. But many balked at wearing the bureaucratic straitjacket that comes with the job, he said.

The judicial system is often troubled by interference by officials, a system for promotions that some feel is overly focused on years of experience and a lack of flexibility in recruitment.

In March 2014, the top court announced it had recruited two academics and Jia Qinglin, the former head of the Beijing Bailun Law Firm, as judges. Jia, a veteran lawyer, was appointed a presiding judge at the supreme court, making him the first to be hired to that post from outside the judicial system.

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He Weifang, a law professor at Peking University, said that one problem with restarting the program is that "without judicial independence, it only serves to turn lawyers into government officials, not court judges.”

A former top court judge named Jiang Yong actually left the position to set up Tiantong Law Firm in Beijing in 2002. He said the recruitment effort is well-intentioned, but has failed because in China's judicial system, judges who cannot act as they see fit are unsatisfied in their work and do not get the respect that good lawyers do.

"As a lawyer, we have a good reputation and get respect for serving our clients well,” he said. "We don't want to end up as a judge one day when we have to fight with colleagues to rise through the ranks.”

Wang Xixin, deputy dean of Peking University's School of Law, said that the latest recruitment initiative ultimately will not work if red tape is not cleared up. He added that better pay would make serving as a judge more appealing.

(Rewritten by Li Rongde)