• Women and the Law
  • (1) Continue to improve laws and regulations on gender equality.

    (2) Strengthen gender-equality review of the laws, regulations and policies.

    (3) Constantly promote women's awareness and capabilities of safeguarding their own rights and interests in accordance with the law.

    (4) Crack down on rape, abduction and sale of women, and organizing, forcing, enticing, accommodating and introducing women to engage in prostitution and other criminal offenses that infringe upon women's personal rights.

    (5) Prevent and curb domestic violence against women.

    (6) Protect women's property rights and interests in marriage and family relationships.

    (7) Guarantee women's access to legal and judicial assistance according to law.

    Strategies and Measures:

    (1) Continue to improve legislation on the protection of women's rights and interests. In view of the acute problems involved in protecting women's rights and interests, formulate and improve relevant laws and regulations to protect women's rights in the spheres of politics, culture and education, person, property, work, social security, marriage and family.

    (2) Promote inspection of the contents in regulations and policies that violate the principle of gender equality. Implement Legislative Law stipulations with respect to the filing and inspection systems and procedures of relevant regulations and policies; strengthen, in accordance with the law, the filing and inspection of regulations and policies that violate gender equality, and correct any articles and contents that violate the gender-equality principle in the current regulations and policies.

    (3) Guarantee women's orderly participation in legislation. Guide and encourage women to participate in legislative activities through various channels to voice their opinions and suggestions. Expand channels through which women's federations and other women's organizations can participate in legislation and express opinions and suggestions on a wider scale.

    (4) Support and cooperate with people's congresses at all levels on monitoring the implementation of laws and regulations relative to women's rights and interests protection, better understand problems arising in the course of their implementation and offer opinions and suggestions for their solution.

    (5) Give extensive and thorough publicity to laws and regulations on the protection of women's rights and interests. Strengthen legal popularization, incorporate the dissemination of laws and regulations and legal education on the protection of women's rights and interests into the nationwide legal popularization program, and promote the dissemination of these laws and regulations in urban and rural communities. Carry out law popularization activities through various channels and in various forms targeted especially at women.

    (6) Strengthen training on gender theory. Integrate such theory into regular legislative, judicial and law-enforcement departments training courses to raise gender awareness of the personnel of those departments.

    (7) Increase women's influence on jurisdiction and law enforcement. Encourage and recommend qualified women candidates to work as people's jurors. Encourage and recommend women with professional backgrounds as special procurators or people's supervisors at people's procuratorates.

    (8) Crack down on the criminal offenses of organizing, forcing, enticing, accommodating and introducing women to engage in prostitution. Strengthen rectifying measures, intensify supervision and control, thoroughly investigate and close down places of entertainment that provide pornographic services, and stringently punish perpetrators in accordance with the law. Strengthen comprehensive public order management and encourage people to monitor and report pornographic activities that constitute law violations or criminal offenses.

    (9) Strengthen efforts against abduction of and trafficking in women. Adhere to the principle of putting prevention first and combining prevention and control, and heighten the general public's anti-abduction awareness and women's awareness of precaution. Strengthen comprehensive control and intensify efforts to crack down on the abduction and sale of women. Give more help to rescued women to recover physically and mentally and return to society.

    (10) Prevent and curb domestic violence against women. Promote legislation on preventing and curbing domestic violence. Step up publicity and education to raise awareness of the whole society of the need and ability to resist domestic violence, and promote the self-protection ability of women victims of domestic violence. Improve the multi-sectoral cooperation mechanism on preventing and curbing domestic violence, and also the working mechanism that integrates prevention, curbing and rescue.

    (11) Effectively prevent and curb sexual harassment of women. Establish and improve the legislature and working mechanism on sexual harassment prevention and containment, and strengthen efforts to combat sexual harassment. Employing units should adopt effective measures to prevent sexual harassment in work places.

    (12) Safeguard women's property rights and interests within marriage and family relationships. Reflect the principle of gender equality in accordance with relevant laws and regulations when trying cases involving marriage, family and inheritance. When divorce cases come to court, while offering wives just compensation, take into consideration the labor they devote to taking care of their families, their survival and development needs after divorce, and their needs with respect to rearing minor children.

    (13) Protect rural women's lawful rights and interests within the villagers' self-governance mechanism. Implement the Organic Law of the Villagers' Committees of the People's Republic of China, and guarantee that women exercise their legal rights in democratic election, decision-making, management and supervision. Governments at township (town) level should make timely corrections should they find provisions contradicting those contained in the State Constitution, laws, regulations or policies, or contents involving discrimination against women or harm to women's lawful rights and interests in villagers' self-governance regulations, village rules or villagers' private agreements submitted to them for the record.

    (14) Timely take on cases involving violations of women's rights and interests. Adopt necessary measures, in accordance with relevant legal provisions, during litigation of cases involving women's individual privacy, in order to protect them from being hurt a second time.

    (15) Provide women with legal aid according to law. Raise the general public's awareness of legal aid, and encourage and give help to eligible women to apply for legal aid. Expand legal aid coverage and improve the legal aid network. Encourage and support legal aid service institutions, social organizations and public institutions in providing non-profit legal services and aid.

    (16) Provide women with judicial assistance according to law. Provide judicial assistance to women in financial difficulties or women who need help due to other special conditions, and defer, cut or exempt their litigation fees. Establish a sound system of assistance for victims in criminal cases and provide State aid to women victims living in straitened circumstances sufficient to guarantee their basic livelihood.