Human rights advocates hoped to indicate this was not only a one-off incident, however a systemic challenge ignored by the native authorities. In actual fact, Fengxian, the county the place the lady lived, has lengthy had an notorious status for permitting girls to be kidnapped and bought to males seeking to procreate.
By looking CJO, advocates discovered not less than two earlier circumstances during which kidnapped girls filed for divorce in Fengxian and had been denied; additionally they discovered that individuals who had been prosecuted within the county for human trafficking acquired minimal jail time.
CJO additionally confirmed comparable circumstances from outdoors Fengxian, revealing a sample throughout China. One examine that analyzed 1,480 trafficking circumstances revealed on CJO discovered that one-third of the circumstances concerned girls with psychological disabilities, and that girls had been usually bought for lower than $10,000. All this info was obtained from the publicly out there 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 many largest on-line social actions within the nation in recent times, with individuals repeatedly mentioning the Fengxian lady’s title for months and pushing the federal government for an evidence.
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 into a helpful supply of knowledge on Chinese language companies, with individuals reviewing verdicts to guage 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 circumstances. In 2022, the whole quantity declined 62%, to eight.9 million. He additionally famous that in 2022, solely 854 administrative circumstances (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 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 circumstances, citing the necessity for a system migration. In line with one analysis challenge led by Benjamin Liebman, a legislation professor at Columbia Regulation College, 9% of prison case verdicts had been faraway from the database in a 12-month interval in 2021 and 2022. Sure prison 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 traditional cowl for prosecuting Chinese language protesters.