A former Supreme Court judge has been sentenced to life in prison in north China's Hebei Province, making him the most senior judicial figure convicted in the country since 1949, the Legal Evening News reports.

Huang Songyou.[File photo]

Huang Songyou, 53, was convicted for corruption and accepting bribes by the Hebei Higher People's Court, which had sustained the original judgment in its final judgment.

Huang was charged with accepting more than 3.9 million yuan (US$570,000) in bribes from lawyers in return for favorable rulings from 2005 to 2008 when he was the vice president of the Supreme People's Court (SPC), and embezzling 1.2 million yuan (US$170,000) of government funds in 1997 when he was president of a city-level court in Guangdong Province.

Huang made no comment about the court's verdict, according to Gao Zicheng, Huang's defense lawyer.

The case has attached great attention since last August, when the Disciplinary Commission of the Communist Party of China expelled Huang from the CPC, and the SPC dismissed all his official positions and handed over his case to prosecutors. The public questioned whether justice could be rendered in the case since the suspect was the vice president of the SPC.

According to previous media reports, the sentence was interpreted by the Associated Press as "part of a continuing battle by the CPC against deep-seated corruption."

President Hu Jintao has described corruption as one of the greatest threats to the legitimacy of the CPC's rule and called the anti-corruption campaign a "pressing task."

After Huang Songyou was removed from his position in October 2008, the SPC launched an anticorruption drive last year. The number of cases of law violations inside the courts investigated in the first eight months of 2009 was 51 percent higher than a year earlier.

Moreover, the installation of anti-corruption supervisors in courts was another big move implemented by the SPC. Fourteen full-time supervisors were installed in the Supreme People's Court to oversee judges, court-order enforcement and other court employees.

There are over 24,000 anticorruption supervisors in nearly 2,400 courts all over the country. This system has enabled supervision to reach the front line of court trials and legal enforcement to create a better environment for combating corruption and redressing injustice.