Zhang Xueqing： Can’t tolerate ＂unfinished business＂

Can’t tolerate "unfinished business"

—— The story of Zhang Xueqing, the prosecutor of the Seventh Procuratorate of Yunnan Provincial Procuratorate.

Between officials and the people, administrative procuratorial work plays the role of the last line of defense to safeguard social fairness and justice, and insists on taking law as the basis, convincing people with reasoning, and caring for people. This is the poem and distance of administrative procuratorial work in the new era.

Zhang Xueqing (left) and colleagues discuss administrative non-litigation execution supervision cases.

"Between the officials and the people, the administrative procuratorial work plays the role of the last line of defense to safeguard social fairness and justice, insisting on taking the law as the basis, convincing people by reasoning and emotional people. This is the poem and distance of the administrative procuratorial work in the new era." Zhang Xueqing drew this conclusion from more than 500 cases handled in recent years.

In 2013, Zhang Xueqing was selected from the grass-roots court to work in the Yunnan Provincial Procuratorate. As a fourth-level senior prosecutor of the Seventh Procuratorate, she won many honors: she won the third-class merit once and won several awards; In May, 2023, he was awarded the title of "Expert" in the first national procuratorial organ administrative procuratorial business competition.

Solve the problem of accepting the application for administrative non-litigation execution

In 2019, Zhang and Anmou, residents of a certain district in Yuxi City, illegally occupied land without approval, and were given administrative punishment by the Land and Resources Branch of the district to dismantle illegally occupied buildings and other facilities within a time limit and restore the original state of the land. Within the statutory time limit, Zhang and Anmou did not file a reconsideration or bring an administrative lawsuit, and the District Land and Resources Branch applied to the District Court for enforcement. The district court held that the law gave the administrative organ the power of administrative compulsion to demolish illegal buildings, and ruled that the application for compulsory execution was inadmissible. The District Land and Resources Branch applied to Yuxi Intermediate Court for reconsideration, and the court held that the original ruling of inadmissibility was not improper. District Land and Resources Branch will apply for procuratorial supervision. After examination, Yuxi City Procuratorate held that according to the law, the land department has no enforcement power, so it should not exercise its functions and powers on its behalf, but should apply to the court for enforcement. Therefore, it put forward procuratorial suggestions to Yuxi City Intermediate People’s Court, but they were not adopted. After that, through follow-up supervision, Yuxi City Procuratorate submitted the case to Yunnan Provincial Procuratorate.

As the presiding prosecutor, Zhang Xueqing and Yan Kang, the former head of the Seventh Procuratorate of Yuxi City, formed an up-and-down integrated case-handling team to conduct an in-depth investigation on similar problems in Yuxi City, and found that there were still 75 similar cases with "difficulties in accepting administrative non-litigation enforcement applications". "If you can’t handle the case, you must carry out the right of investigation and verification throughout." Zhang Xueqing made up his mind to solve a field and a class of problems through the handling of individual cases.

How to better promote social governance in administrative procuratorial work? With the decision of the Procuratorate of Yunnan Province, the Seventh Procuratorate of the Institute came forward to negotiate with the relevant departments, and finally reached a consensus: the administrative non-litigation enforcement cases of illegal land occupation on collective land should not be directly enforced by the administrative organs, but should be reviewed by the court after being accepted according to law. The Yunnan Provincial High Court ordered the Yuxi Intermediate Court to correct itself, revoke the ruling that the two courts refused to accept the case, re-accept the case for review, and investigate 75 unaccepted cases to further standardize the issue of "separation of adjudication and enforcement".

Due to the good handling effect, the case was selected as an excellent case by the Supreme People’s Procuratorate.

Seeking a good solution to the 18-year administrative dispute

234 people, such as Li, a retired employee of the former state-owned mining enterprise in Wenshan, have made more than 200 letters and visits to the Wenshan Industry and Information Department and the Letters and Calls Department due to the retirement benefits after the enterprise restructuring in 2003, and the contradictions and disputes have never been resolved. Subsequently, Li and others filed an administrative lawsuit on the grounds that Wenshan Prefecture government failed to perform its administrative obligations. After the first trial, second trial and retrial, the case was ruled inadmissible on the grounds that it did not belong to the scope of accepting the case. Li and others refused to accept it and applied to the Yunnan Provincial Procuratorate for supervision in 2019.

After research and judgment, the Yunnan Provincial Procuratorate held that the case was a dispute over enterprise restructuring, and it was not improper for the court to decide not to accept it. However, can the parties accept such a result? Moreover, among the retired employees involved in the case, in addition to 234 people who filed a lawsuit, there are also more than 300 people who have not filed a lawsuit. If we simply decide not to support the application for supervision, there will be a situation of "unfinished business" and "officials can’t help the people", and the major contradictions and disputes involving hundreds of people, which lasted for more than ten years and amounted to tens of millions of yuan have not been resolved.

The Yunnan Provincial Procuratorate decided that Zhang Xueqing would be the presiding prosecutor of the case, and formed a case-handling team with Yang Zhiping of the Provincial Academy and Rao Hongjia of Wenshan Prefecture Procuratorate, and sank to Wenshan Prefecture to "face-to-face answer questions" and "heart-to-heart communication" with the old employees. At first, the old workers didn’t trust the young team sent by the procuratorate, but after three days of careful communication between the prosecutor and the parties, the old workers finally established initial trust.

In the meantime, Zhang Xueqing took the case-handling team members to travel between Kunming and Wenshan seven times, and explained the law on the spot for more than 60 times. Through repeated discussions on the facts of the case and the application of the law, both the old workers and enterprises expressed their willingness to settle. After comprehensively considering the treatment of retired workers and the current situation of enterprise development, the parties signed a settlement agreement. The case eventually led enterprises to pay more than 49 million yuan of retirement benefits to retired employees, and the 18-year administrative dispute was effectively resolved.

Lay a solid foundation for theoretical investigation of administrative procuratorial work.

In 2019, Zhang Xueqing took the lead in carrying out the special activities of administrative inspection and supervision of migrant workers’ wages. By establishing a normalized working mechanism with the Yunnan Provincial Department of Human Resources and Social Security, it provided institutional guarantee for grassroots procuratorates to effectively carry out special supervision on rectifying wages owed to migrant workers and protect their legitimate rights and interests.

On the eve of the Spring Festival in 2018, the procuratorate of a district in Yuxi received a joint complaint letter from 38 migrant workers’ brothers, claiming that the company owed more than 300,000 yuan in wages and various insurances. The hospital suggested that local social departments strengthen labor law enforcement, and urged the company to pay Chen Mou and other 38 migrant workers wages of 230,000 yuan in time, and pay back some social insurance of 70,000 yuan owed by 38 workers in 2016 and 2017, such as work injury, maternity and medical insurance.

After issuing the procuratorial suggestion, the procuratorial organ actively tracked the handling of the case, and organized and coordinated the District People’s Social Security Bureau, the District Judicial Bureau, the company and Chen Mou to participate in the case hearing. In the end, the company used the financial subsidy of 300,000 yuan to pay the wages and related social insurance expenses of 38 migrant workers, including Chen Mou, and the demands of migrant workers were fully supported.

The problem of migrant workers’ wages has been rectified year after year. What is the problem behind the administrative supervision? What role can the administrative procuratorial department of procuratorial organs play? Through this case, the problem of migrant workers’ asking for wages triggered Zhang Xueqing’s thinking on administrative procuratorial work. Zhang Xueqing began to investigate in the whole province, and wrote a paper "Administrative Procuratorial Supervision Path of Migrant Workers’ Wage-seeking Cases" to solve the problems of irregular labor contract filing, imperfect real-name registration of migrant workers in the construction field, and inadequate payment of labor security deposit, and put forward the countermeasures of administrative procuratorial assistance to eradicate wage arrears. Subsequently, the Yunnan Provincial Procuratorate decided to carry out special activities on this topic in the province. At the same time, Zhang Xueqing wrote "Changing the concept and doing administrative procuratorial work with the small special project of migrant workers’ wages as the starting point", which provided an administrative procuratorial supervision plan.

In October 2019, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate deployed a special activity to "strengthen administrative procuratorial supervision and promote substantive resolution of administrative disputes" throughout the country. To this end, from the initial comprehensive investigation to taking the lead in formulating the province’s plan, and then forming a set of unique work experience in Yunnan, Zhang Xueqing went all out to ensure the effectiveness of this work. In October 2020, due to outstanding work performance, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate held a special event supervision promotion meeting in Yunnan Province, and the Yunnan Provincial Procuratorate made a home exchange speech, which was fully affirmed by the Supreme People’s Procuratorate.

In 2021, Zhang Xueqing was selected into the list of experts in Yunnan Provincial Procuratorate and Yunnan University’s "Civil, Administrative and Public Interest Litigation Procuratorate Research Base", the list of the first batch of labor relations expert think tanks in Yunnan Province, and the first batch of administrative procuratorial talents in the national procuratorial organs.

(Reporter Xiao Fengzhen)