China to cut back access to court rulings, sparking concerns about judicial transparency
- The country says it will be more selective about sharing judgments to public database while setting up new archives for use by legal practitioners
- Top Chinese court says massive volume of data available online poses security threat and makes it difficult for professionals to find case information
The country is also setting up two new archives for court rulings that will offer only limited access or information to the public.
The first is a national court judgments database that only court staff and police can access, which will go online next month.
The second is an archive of legal precedents selected by the Supreme People’s Court. It was set up three months ago, and 2,000 legal precedents have been posted there so far.
Millions of court rulings removed from official Chinese database
The internal court judgment database has raised concerns about whether the country’s courts will stop uploading their decisions to the public database China Judgments Online (CJO), which was set up by former Supreme People’s Court chief justice Zhou Qiang in 2013 in an attempt to promote judicial transparency.
Courts were required to upload rulings to CJO within a week, except those involving state security, minors or other cases the top court deemed to be exceptions.
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But it said courts had drastically scaled down the number of judgments uploaded in recent years – from 19.2 million in 2020 to 10.4 million in 2022 and just 5.1 million since January this year.
It said the large volume of information online posed a security threat to China.
“The massive amount of information uploaded online contains a large amount of information about the country and society, and it eventually becomes a source of information for different parties,” it said.
According to the top court, some companies have mined the database to extract personal and corporate information, compile the data and sell it for purposes such as helping lenders assess a person’s creditworthiness or even for illegal uses such as blackmail.
The disclosure of personal information had also caused family and business disputes, the court said.
It also said the massive amount of information online had made it difficult for legal practitioners and court staff to search the database because there were discrepancies about rulings by different courts.
It added the new database of legal precedents would function as an “upgraded version” of CJO to provide reference for litigation and rulings.
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The court did not say if the legal precedent database would be open to the public, but it noted it would be accessible by government departments, law schools, researchers and legal practitioners.
The new internal database of court judgments will help the government analyse big data, according to the People’s Daily report.
A total of 143 million judgments from courts around the country are now available on CJO.
The Supreme People’s Court did not mention how many previous rulings had been removed from the public archive.
But overseas observers and human rights groups said rulings with potential to embarrass the party, such as cases involving the crime of “provoking troubles and picking quarrels” for challenging the government, had disappeared from the public archive.
Many jurisdictions, including Australia, Britain, Singapore, the US and Hong Kong, allow public access to court judgments online.
Lao Dongyan, a law professor at Tsinghua University, wrote on the social media platform Weibo that although sharing court rulings might bring about some problems, these should be addressed directly instead of ending the disclosures, which would only undermine the credibility of the judiciary.
