Chinese court verdicts have been accessible online for a decade. That is likely about to change.
The new year will be here soon! Typically, it’s a great time for a fresh start. But not always. And today I want to talk about something that’s unfortunately moving in the wrong direction: transparency in China’s judicial system.
Last week, a leaked document started circulating online from China’s highest court, the Supreme People’s Court, saying that by the end of 2023, courts of all levels should finish uploading their judgments to a new “National Court Judgment Document Database.” This database is to come online in January and will only be accessible to internal staff. The document’s authenticity has since been confirmed by Chinese media.
Building an internal digitized system isn’t inherently bad. But this development caused alarm because academics and other experts believe it is likely to replace a similar resource that was free and open to the public: China Judgements Online.
First built in 2013, CJO is one of the largest widely accessible databases that can help someone understand governance in China—a unique window into an increasingly opaque system. By allowing the Chinese public to search through millions of detailed court judgments, it was able to hold the powerful accountable, at least to some degree. If it goes away, that will have a big impact both on Chinese people and those observing from the outside.
Back when it was built, China was still in an era when it celebrated more transparency and oversight over itself. There was even a follow-up regulation in 2016 that instructed judges to avoid finding excuses not to upload their cases.
Sure, Beijing’s top goal may not have been transparency for transparency’s sake; the “main motivation for putting judicial decisions online was likely a desire for greater centralized control over a sprawling system, and an effort to strengthen the courts through enhanced professionalization among judges,” wrote Luo Jiajun and Thomas Kellogg, two legal academics who have been tracking CJO. (Previously, different local courts in China had their own tracking systems.)
Nonetheless, the result was effectively the same. CJO became an important resource for a variety of people: lawyers, scholars, law students, and human rights activists, among others. Today, more than 143 million verdicts have been uploaded to CJO, and the website has been visited more than 100 billion times.
Outside of CJO, it’s incredibly difficult to get the Chinese government to disclose information, but the CJO verdicts, intentionally or not, tell us a lot about the judicial system and what’s happening in the country generally. “If CJO is shut down, it will be difficult to have public scrutiny over individual cases,” Luo tells me.
One particularly powerful example was in early 2022, when an influencer on Douyin documented how a Chinese woman with a mental disability had been abducted and forced to marry, and subsequently gave birth to eight children. The news, as well as initial efforts by the local government to cover it up, quickly angered people across the entire country.
Human rights advocates hoped to show this was not just a one-off incident, but a systemic issue ignored by the local government. In fact, Fengxian, the county where the woman lived, has long had an infamous reputation for allowing women to be abducted and sold to men looking to procreate.
By searching CJO, advocates found at least two previous cases in which abducted women filed for divorce in Fengxian and were denied; they also found that people who were prosecuted in the county for human trafficking received minimal prison time.
Read more
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/20/1085741/china-judgements-online-transparency-government/
