BEIJING, May 14 (Xinhua) -- Chinese prosecutors have taken efforts over the past year to ensure complaint letters and visits involving lawsuits are replied to in a timely manner, according to the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) Thursday.

Procuratorial agencies nationwide received around 971,400 letters and visits from members of the public from March 2019 to March 2020, said Chen Guoqing, deputy procurator-general of the SPP, noting that procedural replies have been given as much as possible within seven days of receiving them.

The agencies provided handling results or progress replies to nearly 139,000 letters and visits within three months, accounting for 99.3 percent of the cases that met the conditions for acceptance by procuratorial agencies, Chen told a press conference.

Procuratorial organs across China started a campaign in March last year to speed up the handling of public grievances, requiring that each letter or visit received should be answered within one week and the handling completed within three months.

Over 650 letters and visits were received by heads and deputy heads of provincial-level procuratorates in 2019, up 14.7 percent year on year, Jia Yu, procurator-general of the People's Procuratorate of Zhejiang Province, said at Thursday's press conference.

This helped the settlement of problems related to 166 letters and visits within a short period, Jia said.

As required by a working regulation, specific dates and venues for procurator-generals and the heads of the procuratorial departments to handle letters and visits should be made public, according to Jia.

He added that procurator-generals of prefecture- and county-level procuratorates should accept public complaints at least once a month on average, with each window lasting no less than half a day.

In the face of a large number of letters and visits from members of the public, Chen said that the Chinese procuratorates have strengthened efforts to meet the need for manpower by asking all prosecutors in related departments to be involved in dealing with public complaints.

An updated online system for handling public complaints launched last December has enabled all procuratorial organs to have whole-process monitoring over handling of complaints, the SPP's deputy procurator-general added.

Chen noted that since March 2019, the SPP's pace of forwarding petition letters to the department in charge has been accelerated to twice a day, adding that Chinese procuratorial organs across the country have also innovated ways to solve public complaints efficiently.

As a result, the number of letters and visits that are repeatedly made has registered a marked fall and the public have shown a higher degree of satisfaction, Chen said.