Human rights advocates hoped to point out this was not only a one-off incident, however a systemic difficulty ignored by the native authorities. In reality, Fengxian, the county the place the lady lived, has lengthy had an notorious fame for permitting ladies to be kidnapped and bought to males seeking to procreate.
By looking out CJO, advocates discovered not less than two earlier instances wherein kidnapped ladies filed for divorce in Fengxian and have been denied; in addition they discovered that individuals who have been prosecuted within the county for human trafficking obtained minimal jail time.
CJO additionally confirmed related instances from outdoors Fengxian, revealing a sample throughout China. One research that analyzed 1,480 trafficking instances revealed on CJO discovered that one-third of the instances concerned ladies with psychological disabilities, and that ladies have been typically bought for lower than $10,000. All this data was obtained from the publicly out there supplies.
On the time this all got here to mild, many individuals believed human trafficking like this was a factor of the previous in China. Then the information from CJO collectively contributed to one of many largest on-line social actions within the nation in recent times, with individuals repeatedly mentioning 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 turn out to be a helpful supply of knowledge on Chinese language firms, with individuals reviewing verdicts to judge whether or not an organization is reliable.
However all this began to take a flip round 2021.
A information visualization by He Haibo, a legislation professor at Tsinghua College in Beijing, exhibits that the annual variety of disclosed verdicts on CJO reached its peak in 2020, with 23.3 million instances. In 2022, the full 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) have been uploaded, which was only a tiny slice of the 670,000 administrative lawsuits that went to trial that yr.
Across the similar time, CJO additionally began to lose case information 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 analysis mission led by Benjamin Liebman, a legislation professor at Columbia Legislation College, 9% of felony case verdicts have 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 tools used for espionage” and “choosing quarrels and upsetting bother”—the latter being a traditional cowl for prosecuting Chinese language protesters.
