We’ve been following this thread for the past few weeks and this post by Sydney based academic Dr Colin Hawes )appears to be the key one if you want to understand how what was once an easy database to access has become increasingly difficult over the last 12 months or so
Hawes writes
I think it’s important to correct some of the impressions given by the Luo & Kellogg article, and the subsequent thread.
As David noted, you can register for the SPC Judgments Database using a foreign (non-Chinese) mobile phone number. I did it a few months ago using my then Canadian mobile number. As I recall, it doesn’t require any other personal information or proof of identity etc.
Secondly, the statement that 11 million judgments disappeared from the database last year is very misleading. It was based on a 26 June 2021 article in South China Morning Post (linked from Luo & Kellogg’s article), which claimed that three months earlier there were 117 million judgments on the database, but by late June, some 11 million had been taken offline, in other words, leaving around 108 million judgments.
However, as noted in the SCMP article, the Supreme People’s Court had announced that this was a technical migration issue and those judgments would reappear again within a few days. The media reporter apparently did not follow up to see if the judgments were back, but as it happens, I wrote a book chapter in July 2021 where I had to check the total number of judgments, and by that stage it was already back to over 120 million judgments just a few weeks later, so it’s pretty clear that this was a technical upgrading rather than some kind of concerted effort to hide judgments from the public. Today, the database contains over 129 million judgments.
Of course, there are a small minority of judgments that do not get published, often those involving senior officials and corruption, or so-called state security (such as the Zhou Yongkang judgment). To answer Knut’s question, some of these types of judgments are initially uploaded but then removed later from the SPC database. If they did appear initially, they may still appear on other commercial databases such as Wusong, but it seems to be inconsistent ( https://www.itslaw.com/home ) . I haven’t done a systematic comparison of the different databases though.
Another practice I have noticed in some “sensitive” cases involving officials is to keep the judgments there but replace all the names with XXX or just give the surname followed by ‘moumou’ like ??? . This prevents a search under the official’s name from giving any results, even though the content of the judgment may still be there.
The other topic mentioned in the SCMP article was death penalty cases: if these were removed previously, at least some of them are now back on the database. Searching under key word ?? gives plenty of results, although the relatively low numbers of death penalty reviews in the Supreme People’s Court (about 50 each year on average) is surely just a partial selection of the real number.
Luo & Kellogg’s article also states that the database no longer contains any cases on the offence of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” but my search today found 3254 judgments where that offence was discussed (searching under the key word ?? picking quarrels). This may not be as many as the “tens of thousands” of cases found by Luo & Kellogg in May 2020, but it is certainly not “zero” as they claim. I also wonder whether this apparent reduction is due to a more sophisticated search function that no longer counts multiple uses of the same key word in a single case as separate results? Perhaps someone on this list who has contacts within the SPC’s tech office can clarify this point?
In other words, the “demise” of transparency in the SPC’s database has been enormously exaggerated here. Yes, of course there are a small minority of cases that are not published, and some individual courts are worse than others in failing to upload their judgments. But as the SCMP article noted (quoting a lawyer who was concerned about the “missing” 11 million judgments): “The Chinese judiciary has made great strides in recent years. It was impossible to get access to any judgments before,” he said. “The trend of improved transparency won’t change.”
Rather than viewing this as a unified and sinister SPC move to limit transparency, I think it is more accurate to see it as evidence of continuing attempts by a minority of powerful government officials and judges who abuse their powers to avoid following the clear rules on publication set out by the SPC.
Colin Hawes (Dr) Associate Professor Faculty of Law University of Technology Sydney
View my research at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=503318
All of that said the following post turned up today with regard to access
“We have been absolutely stumped by the China Judgments Online website. We simply cannot register to the website. No matter what phone we use in Israel, Australia, the US, tried different VPN location settings for the point of origin, or even fake Chinese number generators, we are not receiving the text with the verification code. Is there something we aren’t understanding? The drop down clearly gives the option for foreign numbers.”
