First, the current situation of legal aid work in our region
(a) Legal aid agencies and human resources
1. Chengdong District Legal Aid Center was established in April 2003 with 2 full-time staff. The assistance hall was formally established in August 2009, with an office area of 150 square meters. The hall is equipped with an acceptance and assignment room, a mediation hall, a green channel for migrant workers, a document printing room, a lawyer workstation and a notary liaison station, which is a comprehensive legal aid place. There are currently 7 legal aid workstations 17 in the center, including 9 workstations of Zhenjie Judicial Office, 5 workstations of workers, youth, women, disabled persons' federations and aging committees, and 3 workstations of legal service window units. The director of the Legal Aid Center is also the director of the Bureau of Justice, and the 17 workstation has 3 1 full-time and part-time staff. At present, the center has 19 qualified staff, and the cooperative law firm has 1 1 lawyers, serving all 7 legal service workers under its jurisdiction. The infrastructure of the center is complete, with two office computers, printers and fax machines.
(two) the handling of legal aid cases in the past two years.
20 1 1 * * handled 352 legal aid cases, including 60 criminal legal aid cases, 6/kloc-0 civil legal aid cases, and the recipients 12 1 person. The main source of legal aid cases is application, and all designated cases are criminal cases. The handling effect is ideal, and the recipients are concentrated in vulnerable groups such as farmers, migrant workers, minors, the elderly and women, and the proportion of farmers receiving assistance accounts for more than half of the recipients. The main type of criminal cases is juvenile delinquency, the first three types of civil cases are marriage and family cases, requests for payment of labor remuneration and traffic accidents, and the proportion of administrative cases is extremely small.
(3) Financial guarantee
Judging from the income of legal aid funds in our district, all the funds come from the financial allocation of the district judicial bureau, which shows that the government has begun to pay more attention to legal aid work.
Second, the main problems
(A) the publicity of the legal aid system is not enough.
The standard to measure the publicity effect of legal aid work is "social awareness". According to incomplete statistics, the "social awareness" of legal aid work in our district is low, the awareness of legal aid of vulnerable groups and social strata is low, the awareness of rights protection is not strong, and the legal awareness is weak. Most people in difficulty don't know about legal aid, or know about it, but they don't know what it is, their right to apply for legal aid, where to ask for legal aid, and how to use legal aid to safeguard their legitimate rights and interests. The recognition of the implementation of the legal aid system is not high, and some people even think that "lawyers who don't spend money don't do things." The propaganda is weak, and the research on the orientation, platform, carrier, content, frequency, intensity, form and novelty of social propaganda is not enough.
Insufficient human resources for legal aid. There are only 1 1 public lawyers in the legal aid center of our district, and the team is weak and cannot play its due role; The number of social lawyers accounts for 85% of the lawyers in the region, but only 2.4% of the workload of legal aid cases; Legal service workers and volunteers handled 33.6% of the cases, but their role in legal aid work was limited because they were not qualified as lawyers. There are no professionals in the aid workstation, and the work is not long.
(3) The coverage of legal aid is narrow.
First, the scope of legal aid litigation cases is limited. According to the legal aid regulations, the scope of legal aid cases only includes a small number of civil and administrative cases and the representation and defense of criminal cases. Therefore, it is difficult for vulnerable parties in civil cases such as work-related injuries, traffic accidents, medical accidents and personal injury compensation, administrative counterparts in administrative cases and applicants in enforcement cases to obtain effective legal aid. Second, the object of legal aid has limitations. Because the standard of financial difficulties is generally set below the local minimum living security line, it not only ignores some difficult groups living on the edge of the minimum living security line, but also shuts out some "sandwich layers" whose income is acceptable, but they are poor due to disasters and diseases. In today's turbulent economic situation, legal aid and support are also needed. If possible, we should include these groups in the scope of legal aid.
The coordination mechanism of legal aid has not yet been established.
Legal aid is an important responsibility of the government, which is not only the responsibility of a judicial administrative department, but also the responsibility of all departments involved in legal aid. At present, the problem of coordination among various departments is still outstanding. In the view of some departments, legal aid is only the obligation of lawyers and has nothing to do with themselves. At the same time, due to the lack of information communication mechanism, many people who should have received legal aid lost their opportunities. Therefore, the lack of coordination among various departments is one of the urgent problems in the current legal aid work.
Third, the solution to the problem.
(a) constantly increase the publicity of the legal aid system, improve the social awareness rate. The judicial administrative departments and legal aid institutions should make full use of newspapers, magazines, radio stations, internet and other news media, increase the publicity of legal aid work through legal trips to the countryside and legal consultation, and strive to achieve 90% public awareness of legal aid in cities and 70% in rural areas. Make leaders at all levels pay more attention to and care about legal aid, make all walks of life pay more attention to and support legal aid, make all departments understand and understand their respective responsibilities, form a good atmosphere for the whole society to care, support and participate in legal aid, and make legal aid truly a system that benefits the people and facilitates the people.
(two) the integration and exploration of legal aid resources, to alleviate the contradiction of demand. First, encourage and support capable social groups and organizations to set up various forms of legal aid institutions, making them an important supplement to full-time institutions. Second, the judicial administrative organs should actively strive for the establishment, or straighten out the existing establishment, and select excellent lawyers to work in the legal aid center through internal adjustment. The third is to effectively supervise social lawyers to fulfill their legal aid obligations according to law. Fourth, strengthen the training of legal aid personnel, improve their comprehensive quality, establish and improve the accountability system for handling cases, and ensure the quality of legal aid services.
(three) unblock the channels of legal aid work and provide convenient conditions for legal aid. Public prosecution, law enforcement, arbitration, labor and other departments should strengthen communication and coordination, smooth working channels, so that all organs can form a joint force. Give full play to the role of 12348 legal service hotline, judicial office and legal aid workstation, extend the reach of legal aid to the grassroots, and maintain social stability and harmony. If the parties have legal aid needs that meet the requirements after examination, they can provide them in time in the fastest time and under the most convenient conditions, so as to maximize the purpose of legal aid work. At the same time, the people's mediation mechanism is introduced into legal aid work, and the judicial aid studio is also a mediation studio, which realizes the "seamless connection" between people's mediation and litigation mediation, effectively reduces the litigation cost of the parties, and relieves the pressure of too many cases in the people's courts.
(four) to explore new ideas of legal aid work and expand the coverage of legal aid. The provisions on the scope of assistance in the Regulations on Legal Aid are far from meeting the judicial needs of the people. It is necessary to take the opportunity of implementing the "three key tasks" deployed by the Central Political Commissar, actively carry out legal aid work, expand the scope of assistance, continuously expand assistance to civil and administrative cases, and try to introduce an assistance system into case execution. At the same time, we should do a good job in rural legal aid around the outstanding problems of current rural reform and development. For cases involving rural land contract disputes, cases that undermine democracy and infringe on farmers' democratic rights, we should actively intervene, take the initiative to serve, provide legal aid to farmers according to law, safeguard farmers' legitimate rights and interests, and promote rural social harmony and stability.