Wang Shengjun, president of China's Supreme People's Court (SPC), on Wednesday called for stepped-up efforts to fight corruption in the country's court system, two weeks after a former SPC vice president was sentenced to life for taking bribes and embezzlement.

Noting that progress had been made in anti-corruption work in China's court system in 2009, Wang said efforts must still be made to accelerate the establishment of a prevention and punishment system against court-related graft.

He urged Chinese court staff to be more determined and take more decisive and solid measures to fight against corruption in the new year.

Wang's words came two weeks after Huang Songyou, former SPC vice president, was sentenced to life imprisonment for taking bribes and embezzlement on Jan. 19.

Huang was convicted of taking more than 3.9 million yuan (about 574,000 U.S. dollars) in bribes from 2005 to 2008 when serving as SPC vice president, and embezzling 1.2 million yuan of public funds in 1997, when he was president of the Intermediate People's Court of Zhanjiang, a city in south China's Guangdong Province.

In a fresh effort to prevent abuse of judicial power and fight corruption, the SPC on Jan. 27 issued a new regulation which listed restrictions on court staff, ranging from taking bribes to committing adultery with litigants.

The regulation stipulated that judiciary staff would be punished if they were found meddling and intervening court cases, giving bribes to law enforcement personnel, beating or verbally abusing petitioners and over-running timetables to enforce court rulings.

Judiciary staff would receive punishments ranging from demerits on their records, demotion, removal from posts and dismissal, according to the regulation.