What is the Civil Code like?

As the most important law to protect the rights and interests of individuals, the Civil Code concerns every aspect of a person's life from the cradle to the grave, and is known as the "encyclopedia of social life". The General Provisions of the Civil Code is the general outline of the Civil Code, and as the saying goes, "when the outline is lifted up", "the eye can be spread out", so it is of vital importance to the integration of the entire Civil Code.

Specific content:

On the afternoon of March 8, the twelfth session of the National People's Congress held its second plenary meeting. The meeting listened to the deputy chairman of the NPC Standing Committee Li Jianguo's explanations on the draft General Principles of the Chinese People's **** and National Laws. In the next few days, the delegates and members of the General Principles of the Civil Law (hereinafter referred to as the draft) will be deliberated, discussed and voted on at the closing session of the People's Congress on the 15th.

Laying down the rules by Xu Jun (Xinhua)

Why is the draft General Principles of the Civil Law so important? What are the highlights? Wang Liming, vice president of the China Law Society, and Wang Yi, secretary-general of the China Civil Law Research Society, the drafters of the expert proposal for the General Principles of Civil Law, explain the draft.

Time and national **** integration

As the most important law to protect the rights and interests of individuals, the civil code is related to all aspects of a person's life from the cradle to the grave, and has been known as "the encyclopedia of social life". The General Principles of the Civil Code is the general outline of the Civil Code, and as the saying goes, "only when the outline is lifted" can the "eyes be opened", so it is crucial for the entire Civil Code to be well rounded and comprehensive.

The draft submitted to the People's Congress for deliberation, its "greatest feature is to fully manifest the concept of humanistic care and the spirit of the times in the 21st century." Wang Liming said the 21st century is the era of the Internet and high technology, but also a century toward rights, which should strengthen the protection of human dignity and freedom. "The ultimate value of civil law is to care for people, and the highest goal is to serve human dignity and comprehensive development. Judging from the basic principles established in the draft, both the basic principle of manifesting the autonomy of private law and the principle of protecting the rights and interests of individuals, which embodies humanistic care, serve the comprehensive development of human beings."

The General Principles of Civil Law and the Civil Code must faithfully reflect the living conditions of today's Chinese people and their aspirations for the legal adjustment of personal and property relations, and thus have a national character.

Wang Liming said the draft promotes the promotion of traditional Chinese culture and the practice of core socialist values, including freedom, equality and justice. "For example, the principle of voluntariness guarantees an individual's self-direction, self-arrangement and self-determination of his private life and civil interactions, which will fully mobilize individual enthusiasm and initiative and promote China's socio-economic development." According to Wang Yi, the importance attached to the home will be more specifically reflected in various sub-sections of the civil code, such as the marriage and family section, the inheritance law section and the property law section.

According to Wang Yi, the draft is of great interest to the public on how to recognize and protect the right to personal information. "Currently, the draft has provisions related to the protection of personal information. However, more experts believe that it is difficult to respond to the public's concern about safeguarding personal information security from the perspective of civil law, and hope that it will be reflected more in the future in the sub-compilation of the civil code." Wang Yi said.

In addition, the draft also responds to the issue of "one old and one young". "An old" refers to the problem of the elderly. The draft of the first "adult guardianship system", clear that spouses, parents, children, etc. as the guardian of adults without civil capacity or limited civil capacity, can be said to adapt to the reality of the needs of the aging society.

"A lesser" refers to the issue of the lower limit of the age of natural persons with limited capacity for civil behavior. Experts discussed the issue in favor of adjusting it from 10 to 6 years of age under the General Principles of Civil Law.

Wang Liming said the draft has many highlights in protecting civil rights. In addition to strengthening the protection of personality rights, in terms of property rights, the draft for the first time used the expression "equal protection", is a major improvement of the property law, highlighting the civil law "equality of private rights" value orientation. In addition, in order to respond to the needs of the knowledge economy and the development of the network era, the draft provides a detailed list of objects of intellectual property rights, expands the scope of intellectual property rights protection, and also provides for the protection of data and network virtual property. The provisions are conducive to the promotion of scientific and technological innovation in the context of big data on the Internet.

By the end of May last year, the codification of various sub-codes of the civil code had been fully launched. According to Wang Yi, as one of the five participating units, the China Law Society has specially set up five subject groups, including contract law, property law, tort liability law, marriage and family law, and inheritance law, to submit expert proposal drafts on each sub-codification respectively. "In the process, the subject groups continued to retain the general civil legislation that worked well; those that had to be changed were modified accordingly."

In February this year, the subject groups have completed their respective expert recommendation drafts, which include both the design of the provisions, as well as the reasons for legislation and reference to legislative examples. At present, the draft proposals have been submitted to the NPC Standing Committee's Legal Affairs Committee. Wang Yi said that the subsequent codification of the Civil Code will modify and improve the general laws that have already been enacted, while adding new content such as the "personality rights law".

"If everything goes well, the entire civil code will be completed by 2020. We will make a group effort to compile a civil code that can stand the test of history, which is the dream of all legal workers."