I don’t think anyone has posted about the SPC’s Dec. 22 announcement and accompanying Q&A about not one but two new court judgment databases: the internal one leaked about a few weeks ago plus a public one that will be carefully curated to provide an “authoritative” and unified take on the law. Here is the summary (with embedded links) that we posted in the US-Asia Law Institute’s regular feature,
This Week in Asian Law:
The SPC issued a public announcement (??????????????????) to clarify the future transparency of court judgments after weeks of speculation triggered by a leaked document. In its announcement and separate Q&A, the court said that it is launching two new digital case archives:
- a People’s Courts Case Archive (???????) with cases selected for their reference value, which will “of course be open to experts and scholars, lawyers, litigants, and other members of the public (???????????????????????????)”; and
- a National Court Judgments Archive (?????????) that will exist on a court system intranet (????????).
The existing publicly accessible database China Judgement Online (???????), which was launched in 2014 and has more than 143 million judgments, will continue operating but with stricter management to protect national security and parties’ privacy rights. Some Chinese law scholars have expressed concern that the SPC is backtracking from the goal of judicial transparency.
The SPC has so far curated more than 2,000 mostly civil cases for the People’s Courts Case Archive and is inviting nominations from the public for cases to add. Based on the process described, growth is likely to be slow. It also sounds as if what is posted will be a polished account of the case, similar to guiding cases and typical cases. Also similar: courts will be required to search the new archive for relevant cases (???????????????).
Bloomberg and SCMP have reports about the two new archives. China Daily only reports on the case archive, not the internal one.
Katherine Wilhelm
U.S.-Asia Law Institute, NYU School of Law
