China’s judicial system is becoming even more secretive

Human rights advocates hoped to point out this was not only a one-off incident, however a systemic challenge ignored by the native authorities. In reality, Fengxian, the county the place the lady lived, has lengthy had an notorious popularity for permitting girls to be kidnapped and bought to males trying to procreate. 

By looking out CJO, advocates discovered a minimum of two earlier instances wherein kidnapped girls filed for divorce in Fengxian and had been denied; in addition they discovered that individuals who had been prosecuted within the county for human trafficking acquired minimal jail time. 

CJO additionally confirmed related instances from exterior Fengxian, revealing a sample throughout China. One study that analyzed 1,480 trafficking instances revealed on CJO discovered that one-third of the instances concerned girls with psychological disabilities, and that girls had been usually bought for lower than $10,000. All this data was obtained from the publicly obtainable supplies.

On the time this all got here to gentle, many individuals believed human trafficking like this was a factor of the previous in China. Then the data from CJO collectively contributed to one of the largest online social movements within the nation lately, with individuals repeatedly citing the Fengxian lady’s identify for months and pushing the federal government for a proof.

CJO has served many different functions over time. Activists used it to uncover the prosecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang and the criminalization of on-line protests. It has even change into a helpful supply of data on Chinese language firms, with individuals reviewing verdicts to guage whether or not an organization is reliable.

However all this began to take a flip round 2021. 

A data visualization by He Haibo, a legislation professor at Tsinghua College in Beijing, reveals that the annual variety of disclosed verdicts on CJO reached its peak in 2020, with 23.3 million instances. In 2022, the entire quantity declined 62%, to eight.9 million. He additionally famous that in 2022, solely 854 administrative instances (the place the federal government is the defendant) had been uploaded, which was only a tiny slice of the 670,000 administrative lawsuits that went to trial that 12 months. 

Across the identical time, CJO additionally began to lose case recordsdata en masse. In only one three-month interval in 2021, CJO directors eliminated over 11 million instances, citing the necessity for a system migration. In accordance with one research mission led by Benjamin Liebman, a legislation professor at Columbia Legislation Faculty, 9% of felony case verdicts had been faraway from the database in a 12-month interval in 2021 and 2022. Sure felony offenses have been completely erased on the platform, together with “illegally producing or promoting gear used for espionage” and “selecting quarrels and scary bother”—the latter being a basic cowl for prosecuting Chinese language protesters.