China’s top court pledges more transparency after sharp drop in judgments shared online

Supreme People’s Court says it will balance legal transparency with privacy protection, after reduced access to court verdicts sparked outcry
But ‘selective access’ of rulings is likely to remain a barrier, criminal lawyer says

Human rights in China

Phoebe Zhang

Published: 7:00pm, 15 Jan 2024

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China’s top court has promised to publish more legal decisions online after a controversial move to roll back access to court rulings raised alarm last month.

In Beijing on Sunday, the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) pledged to provide services to the public, experts and scholars for research and legal purposes, according to state news agency Xinhua

An SPC spokesperson told presidents of China’s higher courts that it would require that all rulings that could serve as a warning or that could educate the public be published, and that more decisions from the SPC and higher courts would be published online to ensure transparency across a wider variety of cases.

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It comes a month after the SPC admitted publicly that courts had in recent years reduced the number of uploaded verdicts on China Judgments Online, a website run by the SPC, from 19.2 million in 2020 to 10.4 million in 2022, and just 5.1 million 2023.

The court also announced in December that it would establish two new archives for court rulings that would offer only limited public access, prompting alarm and anger among scholars, lawyers and the public, with many slamming the move as incompatible with the “sunshine judiciary” principle Beijing has promoted.

In its announcement on Sunday, the SPC said the new services were intended to solve problems with the website, including security risks and failures to protect individual rights.

It also said the rights and privacy of individuals would be guarded so that personal information about litigants or companies involved in cases was protected.

Zhu Xiaoding, a Beijing-based criminal lawyer, said the Sunday meeting was an attempt by the top court to correct its own errors after a public outcry.

However, he remained pessimistic about the extent to which judgment documents would be made available online, as barriers such as “state secrets, individual privacy and commercial secrets” remained in place.

“I think selective access to legal documents is still going to be common in the future,” he said.

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In addition to a promise to increase the number of legal documents published online, the SPC also said it would stop categorising economic disputes as criminal cases, in a show of support for the private sector.

More legal protections for copyright would also be provided, the court said, which added that all public petitions should be responded to.

It also pledged to promote the “Fengqiao experience” to ease burdens on higher legal bodies. Last year, courts around the country mediated 12 million disputes, or about 40 per cent of all civil and administrative cases, the SPC said.

The concept of the “Fengqiao experience in the new era” is based on a Mao-era model for resolving social conflicts at the grass-roots level that Chinese President Xi Jinping has repeatedly praised, calling it an integral part of improving “social governance”.

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Xi has said that China’s special circumstances meant that it could not become “a country of litigation”.

“We have 1.4 billion people, if everything, big or small, has to be decided by a lawsuit, our system wouldn’t be able to bear the burden,” he said in 2021, calling for more legal power to guide and mediate conflicts.

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