Constitutional Scholar and Director of the Center for Filing and Review System of Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. (Nongjian/Photo)
On the morning of September 27, 2022, when teaching students constitutional lessons, Professor Wang Kai from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics cited the case of "traffic police checking mobile phones" to explain the provisions on the secrets of citizens' communications.
This is a case mentioned in the 2019 report on the filing and review of the Legal Affairs Committee of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress: local regulations give traffic police departments the right to review and copy car owners' communication records. The Legal Affairs Committee believes that this exceeds the legislative authority and the relevant regulations have been revised after being pointed out.
combined with this example, the discussion can be extended in the classroom: What exactly does the communication secret protect? Does the so-called communication refer only to letters, or includes emerging communication tools? In the past, the academic community had little research on this article, and after the case was announced, "Constitutional scholars have published twenty or thirty articles in succession," said Wang Kai.
After promoting the abolition of the shelter and education system and promoting the resolution of problems such as " maternity insurance set threshold", "dismissal if you exceed your birth", " personal injury compensation has different life prices", the filing and review system has become more and more obvious.
In 2021, in order to strengthen the theoretical research on filing and review, the Legislative Affairs Committee of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress established a filing and review expert committee. As a constitutional scholar, Wang Kai was invited to become a member of the expert committee.
With the improvement of the filing and review system, citizen participation is constantly increasing. According to data released by the Legislative Affairs Committee of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, in 2003, there were only 62 review suggestions put forward by citizens and organizations. By 2021, this number reached 6,339.
For Wang Kai, there are more and more cases in class. Before the Legal Affairs Committee released its first filing and review report in 2017, since there were few domestic cases, foreign examples had to be used. Now, "we can't finish the cases alone."
From unpopular topics to academic hot topics
Wang Kai first heard that the filing and review was in 2004. He was 26 years old and studied for a doctorate at Hunting University of China . He studied under the constitutional scholar Hu Jinguang , who specializes in constitutional review.
One morning in June that year, on the way to the cafeteria, Wang Kai met a classmate holding a newspaper in his hand and said to him, "You who study the Constitution are blessed, and the unconstitutional review agency has been established." The newspapers are published with news about the establishment of a filing and review office of the Legislative Affairs Committee of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress. The news about
quickly attracted the attention of the academic community. However, the work of the filing and review room has not been presented publicly for a long time.
Despite this, Wang Kai still had the idea of studying this system. At that time, the supervisor Hu Jinguang asked doctoral students to organize reading meetings every month, and everyone took turns to give academic reports on thematic topics. In 2006, when it was Wang Kai's turn to report, he chose the filing review system.
chose this topic because in the past, academic research on constitutional review mainly focused on foreign models and analyzed which one should be borrowed from, but China has actually proposed its own plan - filing review, but the system effect is not obvious. Wang Kai explained, "My starting point is to see if the existing system can operate and how to make it work to the greatest extent."
The so-called filing review means to review the constitutionality and legality issues in normative documents such as laws and regulations, judicial interpretations, and urge the formulation authorities to correct the issues that do not comply with the provisions of the Constitution and laws and are obviously inappropriate. The Legislative Affairs Committee of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress is the department mainly responsible for this work.
After that, Wang Kai has not stopped studying the filing review. In 2007, after graduating from his Ph.D., he entered Beihang Law School as a teaching position.
In 2009, as soon as he was promoted to associate professor, he was invited by the filing and review office to give lectures to the staff responsible for filing and review of local people's congresses. At that time, among the other seven experts invited, in addition to him, there were also those who were the vice president of , China University of Political Science and Law, and others. "I am the only one who is an associate professor, and everyone else is already a well-known scholar."
filing review was an unpopular topic in the academic community at that time. Because it was unclear about the situation in practice, most scholars' research focused on theoretical discussion.
Former Deputy Secretary-General of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress Qiao Xiaoyang described the filing and review work during this period as "a duck and a duck water", which means that although there is no movement on the surface, the soles of the feet are working under the water.
What exceeded Wang Kai's expectations was that the "Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Several Major Issues Concerning Comprehensively Promoting the Rule of Law" passed by the Fourth Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China clearly proposed to improve the constitutional supervision system of the National People's Congress and its Standing Committee, and strengthen the filing and review system and capacity building. After that, the report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China proposed to strengthen the implementation and supervision of the Constitution and promote constitutional review. Driven by policies, the filing review has made breakthrough progress in recent years.
On December 24, 2017, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress listened to the filing and review work report for the first time, disclosed the number of review suggestions put forward by citizens and organizations, the filing situation submitted by various places, and also listed some typical cases.
"I didn't expect it." Even though he had been paying attention to the field of filing and review for a long time, when he saw the news released by the report, Wang Kai was still surprised at the speed of disclosure.
People's Congresses at all levels have also strengthened their attention to filing and review work. One of Wang Kai’s intuitive feelings is that in the past two years, local people’s congresses have begun to invite him to conduct training lectures on filing and review, which is rare in the past.
Review Room think tank
There has also been more exchanges between academic and industry.
After that training in 2009, Wang Kai did not have too much contact with the Filing and Review Office of the Legislative Affairs Committee of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress. It was not until an academic seminar in 2018 that Wang Kai met Liang Ying, director of the filing and review office. After
, he proposed to Liang Ying the idea of establishing a filing review system research center in the school. "We hit it off and he was very supportive." Wang Kai said that at that time, for the filing and review office, they were facing legislative review in different fields, and they were also in need of academic experts to become their think tanks.
In September 2019, under the guidance of the filing and review office, the Beihang Registration and Review System Research Center was established. There are 30 people in the Academic Committee of the Research Center. In addition to the participation of scholars, there are also personnel from the Filing and Review Office and the Ministry of Justice’s Legal Inspection Bureau.
Every yearly, the annual meeting of the Research Center will select important issues in the field of filing and review for discussion, and the topic will be discussed by the Filing and Review Office and Research Center.
Wang Kai recalled that the topic of the 2020 discussion was the difficulty encountered by the filing and review office in the practice process: when a document is modified or revoked after review, how should the previous judgments made based on the document be handled? At that time, no scholar had done special research on this, and in practice, this became a difficult problem.
In 2021, scholars' participation in specific cases of filing and review has further: the Legal Affairs Committee established a filing and review expert committee, and the first batch of 12 scholars were invited as members, including constitutional scholars such as Han Dayuan and Mo Jihong, as well as experts in the fields of legislation and administrative law, administrative law, and Wang Kai and his mentor Hu Jinguang were also invited to become members of the expert committee.
On November 19, 2021, the first meeting of the Expert Committee was held at the National People's Congress Conference Center. In addition to the expert committee members, Shen Chunyao, director of the Legal Affairs Committee, and two deputy directors also attended the meeting.
As a member of the expert committee, we need to provide expert opinions on difficult review cases and make suggestions to the Legal Affairs Committee on the development of future filing and review work.
Wang Kai received a letter from the filing and review office, hoping that he would put forward his views on a regulation on the lifelong prohibition of professional qualifications. Some local regulations stipulate that those who have been administrative or criminally punished for illegal activities such as lock opening and official seal engraving are prohibited from engaging in this industry for life. After
, Wang Kai wrote an opinion of more than 10,000 words to discuss it, believing that this regulation is inconsistent with Criminal Law , and fed it back to the Legal Affairs Committee in writing. This case is mentioned in the
2021 filing and review work report. The review believes that in areas where laws and administrative regulations do not stipulate employment restrictions, and when local regulations make relevant employment restrictions, it is not advisable to stipulate a "lifelong prohibition".
There are 3 times more students who choose courses
With the development of filing and review work, Wang Kai also felt from the exchanges with the practical department that the filing and review field needs more talent reserves.
At present, the three levels of the provincial, municipal and county 3 people's congress standing committees are basically 3 people, 2 people and 1 person, which is far from meeting the needs. In addition to the National People's Congress system, the government, party committee and military systems also require the registration and review of talents.
Since 2021, Beihang Law School has begun to offer elective courses on "Registration Review Theory and Practice" to undergraduates. This is the first course in domestic law schools that specializes in filing review. There are 16 lectures in the
course. The theoretical part of the first eight lectures was taught by Wang Kai, and the practical content of the last eight lectures was left to the staff of the filing and review room.
The process of writing a letter to the Legal Affairs Committee to invite the staff of the filing and review office to attend the class was "very smooth". Wang Kai said that less than half a month after applying for the application, he received a reply from the Legal Affairs Committee with the consent. What surprised him even more was that those who came to teach were all backbones of the filing and review office: Director Liang Ying, Deputy Director Yan Dongfeng, and two directors of the core business department.
The new semester starts, and Wang Kai found that the number of students who choose courses in 2022 is three times more than in 2021. He asked the students why they chose this course. Most of the answers are: I often see the word "record review" in the news, so I have a stronger interest.
In Wang Kai's view, there is still great potential for filing and review in the future. In the past, when talking about the rule of law, more attention was paid to administration according to law and trial according to law, while the filing and review system corresponds to legislation according to law, "the importance of the three should be comparable."
Southern Weekend Reporter Han Qian
