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Back to ‘black box’? As China tightens access to court records, legal experts fear for future of judicial transparency
- China’s top court acknowledges drop in judgments shared on public database, says it will launch new legal archives – but information will be limited
- Prominent lawyers and scholars call the move ‘destructive’, saying it goes against ‘sunshine judiciary’ principle Beijing has promoted
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The blackmail case of Xu Yan, a Chinese policewoman who extorted public officials after having sexual affairs with them, went unnoticed for a year until social media sleuths dug up the verdict online.
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Xu, an auxiliary police officer in the eastern province of Jiangsu, was sentenced to 13 years in prison and fined 5 million yuan (US$700,000) in December 2020 for using her sexual relationships to blackmail the nine men.
She then rose to internet fame after online influencers found the court’s decision on China Judgments Online (CJO), a public database for judicial rulings. The details of the case prompted social media users to question where the officials got the money to pay Xu, whether bribery was involved, and why the men were not punished for sexual misconduct.
The debate generated so much heat that Xu’s sentence was reduced to seven years with a fine of 300,000 yuan on appeal, and authorities eventually punished officials who were previously untouched in the scandal.
The case was one of several in the past decade in which Chinese members of the public used the transparency in the country’s judicial system to openly debate matters in public life that could appear unflattering to Beijing.
But starting next year, things are likely to change.
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