(Adds top judge's comments on protests, crimes) BEIJING, Jan 8 (Reuters) - China's top security official has called on judicial departments to handle unrest at its source to ensure social stability, state media said on Monday. Luo Gan, one of nine members of the Communist Party Politburo Standing Committee that rules China, made the comments while on an inspection tour of the eastern province of Shandong, where "barefoot lawyer" Chen Guangcheng was jailed last year. Increasing numbers of protests and riots had become the most destabilising factor in China and challenged the ruling party's ability to govern, the Xinhua news agency said in a rare appraisal last month. "Luo urged local governments to try their best to resolve prominent problems in economic development and dissolve conflicts and other 'discordant elements' at source," Xinhua reported on Monday. Among Luo's stops in Shandong was the city of Linyi, where Chen was tried on charges his lawyers said were trumped up by vengeful local officials after Chen exposed forced late-term abortions and other family planning abuses. His trials were marked by repeated harassment of his lawyers -- themselves outspoken rights activists -- one of whom was detained and accused of theft, leaving Chen to be defended by stand-in attorneys who knew little about his case. Luo has said in the past that the "rights defence" movement harboured forces dedicated to overthrowing Communist Party rule. MASS INCIDENTS Xiao Yang, president of the Supreme People's Court, echoed Luo on Sunday, saying "mass incidents", a euphemism for protests and riots, had become a prominent issue that affected stability and was worth "particular attention". Chinese courts heard a large number of "major criminal cases" in 2006 relating to explosions, kidnaps and homicides, with the crimes increasingly organised and violent and the culprits ever younger, the Beijing News quoted Xiao as saying. A Jan 1. decision by the Supreme People's Court to take back power to approve death penalties, devolved to provincial higher courts in the early 1980s, would not mean a more lenient criminal justice in the future, Xiao said. "The courts should harshly punish major crimes to safeguard national security and social stability," Xiao reportedly said. Only 1,464 people out of 760,694 criminal defendants, or 0.2 percent, were acquitted in their first trials from January to November last year, Xiao said. Critics say China's judicial system is designed only to convict and help maintain the Communists' grip on power. The Supreme People's Court previously said that 41,038 people had been found innocent between January 1998 and September 2006, accounting for a mere 0.66 percent of the 6.2 million defendants in criminal cases that closed during the period.
