[2] Recently, an intermediate people's court issued a "Notice on an Incident of a Security Guard Attempting to Assault a Female Judge" to all its departments and county (city, district) people's courts:

[3] The notice stated, "Recently, an incident occurred in our city where an outsourced security guard attempted to assault a female judge who was working overtime in her office at night, resulting in minor injuries to the judge during the struggle. The public security authorities are currently conducting further investigations."
 

[4] The notice used three parallel sentences to express strong shock, indignation, and condemnation. This incident took place during the strict pandemic control period, within the supposedly heavily guarded judicial premises, and in the judge's regular office where daily work and case handling occur. The behavior was extremely vile, the impact extremely damaging, and the lesson profoundly severe—a typical case of "darkness under the lamp" within the system.
 

[5] First, there is little dispute that the security guard is suspected of rape or forcible indecency and insult against a woman. However, the biggest issue in this case is: which court will try it?
 

[6] In practice, criminal cases are usually under the jurisdiction of the people's court where the crime occurred. This means that if the security guard commits a criminal offense, the female judge from the intermediate court, as the victim, would theoretically have the first trial in a basic court and the second trial in the intermediate court. It is hard to imagine that the basic court, as a subordinate of the intermediate court, could remain objective and fair during the trial. Meanwhile, since the second trial is in the intermediate court, this raises the issue of collective recusal for both the first and second trial courts.
 

In current judicial practice, collective withdrawal of courts mainly includes the following situations:
 

First, when the judicial organ is a party to the case or has an interest or other relationship with the case that may affect the fair handling of the case;
 

Second, when members of the judicial organ are involved in litigation due to official acts;
 

Third, when one of the litigants is the same-level party committee, people's congress, government organ, political consultative conference, or their principal leaders in the region where the court is located;
 

Fourth, when the principal leader or person in charge of the judicial organ, their close relatives, or staff members are parties to the case or have an interest in the case.
 

Although China's current Criminal Procedure Law does not have explicit provisions on collective withdrawal, nor does judicial interpretation contain the content of the collective withdrawal system, cases requiring collective withdrawal of judicial organs often occur during criminal proceedings.
 

For example, in the earlier "Panda Burning Incense" computer virus case, the internal network of a city court in Hubei Province was paralyzed due to the virus, causing the household registration system to crash. Subsequently, the household registration department of that bureau reported the case to the bureau's network surveillance unit. After the case was solved, the bureau found itself both the investigating authority and the victim. At this point, although the investigators did not meet other conditions for recusal, since all investigators were employees of the victim unit, they clearly fell under the legal circumstance of "having other relationships with the parties involved that might affect the fair handling of the case." Therefore, all staff of the bureau should have recused themselves from the case. Similar cases include the Fuzhou City Court bombing in Jiangxi, the Jilin Court bombing, the shooting of a judge in Yongzhou, Hunan, and the murder of a prosecutor in Hainan Court.
 

Therefore, with societal development, collective recusal issues are increasingly encountered. To address collective recusal in practice, establishing a clear and comprehensive collective recusal system is crucial. It not only ensures that parties have their cases tried under relatively fair procedures, reducing unnecessary appeals and petitions, saving judicial resources, and improving judicial efficiency, but also helps prevent investigators from engaging in malpractice or forming preconceptions, ensuring their objective and fair handling of criminal cases, and safeguarding judicial authority and fairness.
 

References: Wang Xuetang, "On the Collective Recusal System of Courts, Starting from the Attempted Sexual Assault of a Female Judge on Night Duty by a Security Guard"

Author unknown, "Collective Recusal in Criminal Proceedings"

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