As it affects the individual citizen, you have to look at how the different organs of justice, as they're called in China, have been changing the way they do their jobs, as well as the form of professionalization that is taking place in the Supreme People's Court. Where 20 years ago, 10 years ago, very few people were legally trained, now almost all...not all, because there's grandfathering and grandmothering that has taken place in terms of the quality of the judges and prosecutors. When you see that you have 120,000 judges who are now all very close to being legally trained, or will be in the next five years under their plan, and you see some 140,000 prosecutors who will be in the same category of being legally trained, with law degrees, in other words, and when you see that there are 160,000 lawyers--whatever the comments were about lawyers--who are doing their jobs in terms of making sure that when you make laws, the laws will be respected and implemented, then you can see that evolution of professionalization. It makes the institutions respond.
So what we have been trying to do on behalf of Canada is indicate to them what other countries do, what the basics are that need to be taken into account, provide them with the information, and show them how we do it, what our value system is, what our ethical codes are. And that includes the work the Canadian Bar does with the legal profession, the work that the National Institute of Justice is doing with the judges, what we're doing with the prosecutors, and what parliamentarians are doing, as was mentioned, with the legal and justice committee of China on how to legislate and draft laws so that you can properly interpret them.
An example is the story I mentioned in the brief. It shows you today as compared to 1999. In 1999 there were 600 legal aid centres operating throughout China, handling about 60,000 cases a year, providing advice to about 800,000 people on both the criminal procedures law and the lawyers law. In 2006, the last count, they handled 318,514 cases and 3,193,801 persons. These are the Chinese statistics.
So legal aid, in and of itself, with the help of Canada--because we were the first ones in there to set up a national legal aid system--hits the individual citizen, hits the vulnerable groups, hits the women who are facing violence. There is a lot of work being done on violence against women, protection of children, and so on.