The Downfall of Judicial Transparency in China

Thursday - December 21 2023, 07:40 UTC - 11 months ago

The current judicial transparency in China is moving in the wrong direction, as courts all over the country are preparing to upload their judgments to a secret database in January 2024. This move comes despite years of celebrating transparency over itself, and puts millions of verdicts at the risk of never seeing the light of day. It also reveals the systemic issue plaguing China's legal system, particularly how women, especially those with mental disabilities, are being abducted and sold for less than $160.

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.

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.

CJO also showed similar cases from outside Fengxian, revealing a pattern across China. One study that analyzed 1,480 trafficking cases published on CJO found that one-third of the cases involved women with mental disabilities, and that women were often sold for less than 1,000 yuan — the equivalent of $160.