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Inherent Limitations On Chinese Law: Poor People Need Not Apply.

By Dan Harris and Steve Dickinson

And the sign said anybody caught trespassin' would be shot on sight So I jumped on the fence and-a yelled at the house, "Hey! What gives you the right?" "To put up a fence to keep me out or to keep mother nature in" "If God was here he'd tell you to your face, Man, you're some kinda sinner."

China Business Law Blog has an interesting post, entitled, "Migrant Workers Self Help: Extreme Edition," on how poor people in China can be shut out of legal proceedings. Nothing terribly surprising here, because, as far as I know, this goes on in virtually every country, but well worth noting nonetheless. Problem is that as China's wealth and the importance of its laws continues to increase, poor people are likely to become increasingly marginalized in terms of their legal rights. Like everywhere else, good lawyers in China are not cheap. China Business Law Blog rightly posits that when China's poor cannot afford justice in the courts, they will resort to self help:

For want of justice, people can resort to self help or the law. As the migrant workers often do, self help appears to be the most sensible and accessible method of achieving justice. A plausible reason for their tendency to self help is that they do not have the money to hire lawyers; and they probably do not know to report the violators to the proper authorities, thus availing themselves of administrative assistance. Or, they do not have faith in the legal system in its ability to dispense justice to poor migrant workers. Irrespective of the reason, this phenomenon reveals an undeniable weakness in the Chinese legal system?the poor, the weak, and the disenfranchised do not have easy access to it. (Of course, this is not a problem unique to China.)

It will be interesting to see how (and when) China starts really dealing with this issue.

Full post as published by China Law Blog on January 09, 2008 (boomark / email).