Human rights advocates hoped to point out this was not only a one-off incident, however a systemic subject ignored by the native authorities. In reality, Fengxian, the county the place the girl lived, has lengthy had an notorious fame for permitting girls to be kidnapped and bought to males seeking to procreate.
By looking CJO, advocates discovered not less than two earlier circumstances by which kidnapped girls filed for divorce in Fengxian and had been denied; in addition they discovered that individuals who had been prosecuted within the county for human trafficking obtained minimal jail time.
CJO additionally confirmed comparable circumstances from outdoors Fengxian, revealing a sample throughout China. One research that analyzed 1,480 trafficking circumstances printed on CJO discovered that one-third of the circumstances concerned girls with psychological disabilities, and that girls had been typically 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 information from CJO collectively contributed to one of many largest on-line social actions within the nation in recent times, with folks repeatedly mentioning the Fengxian lady’s title for months and pushing the federal government for a proof.
CJO has served many different functions through the years. 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 firms, with folks reviewing verdicts to judge whether or not an organization is reliable.
However all this began to take a flip round 2021.
A knowledge visualization by He Haibo, a regulation 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 full 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 recordsdata 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 undertaking led by Benjamin Liebman, a regulation professor at Columbia Legislation College, 9% of legal case verdicts had been faraway from the database in a 12-month interval in 2021 and 2022. Sure legal offenses have been completely erased on the platform, together with “illegally producing or promoting gear used for espionage” and “choosing quarrels and frightening hassle”—the latter being a traditional cowl for prosecuting Chinese language protesters.
