- A database of rulings designed to improve public confidence in the judicial system offers unprecedented insights into the workings of the courts
- Lawyers say details of many sensitive cases are being withheld or removed, but the reform is helping to make the system fairer and more transparent
looking at how China’s legal system has changed over the decades and some of the challenges it faces today. Here, Mimi Lau and Echo Xie look at an attempt to boost public confidence in the courts by publishing their procedures and rulings.
The case of a Chinese policeman who was jailed for raping a woman while on duty was largely kept out of the public eye when he was first convicted last August.
But four months later, after Zhang Yunlong lost an appeal against his 4½-year sentence and details of the 2019 attack were published on a national database run by the country’s highest court, the story quickly became headline news.
Details of the case – Zhang had sent his colleagues back to the police station with two suspects while questioning the woman alone in a hotel room in Hefei late at night – triggered a heated debate about his relatively lenient sentence and the abuse of power by law enforcers.
In the past, cases such as Zhang’s might never have come to light because of the lack of transparency within a system that is often described as a “black box” by the public and laced with systemic corruption and rampant abuse of power.
