Summary：The judicial railway administration in Chongqing Municipality, Yunnan Province and Hubei Province has been moved from the railway system to local judiciary.

The judicial railway administration in Chongqing Municipality, Yunnan Province and Hubei Province has been moved from the railway system to local judiciary.

Chongqing and Yunan switched over on May 4 and Hubei made the change on May 5, a welcome change to what many considered to be an unfair system.

Since January 20, similar changes were seen in provinces of Shannxi, Shanxi, Jiangsu, Gansu, Anhui and Beijing Municipality.

The transfer of administrations was declared in December 2010, but few railway courts or procuratorates actively responded to the change.

According to Liu Bin, a researcher with the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the initiative for the current reform comes from an announcement from the Ministry of Railways that it will cease to finance the railway courts and procuratorates as of the end of June.

The Chinese railway judicial administration was copied after the Soviet model. In such a system, the state-owned railway organs are in charge of railway transportation and construction as well as the establishment of railway courts and procuratorates, which maintain exclusive jurisdiction over railway cases and concerns. In this system, judges are employees of state-owned enterprises rather than public servants.

The legitimacy of railway courts has received wide public criticism in recent years, as many worry that this sort of system will always benefit the state-owned enterprises. It was also reported that the salary for mid-level judges in the railway courts were double that of their local counterparts.

In 2008, a laborer with a mental illness died in a train after being tied up by the train conductor. A sentence of 2 years imprisonment on the chief conductor for manslaughter aroused deep suspicion regarding the impartiality of the railway court. Fifteen experts, lawyers and journalists signed a petition, and it was given at the National People's Congress, China's top legislative body.

Efforts to reform the railway system began more than 10 years ago, but reforms moved at a slow pace.