Human rights advocates hoped to point out this was not only a one-off incident, however a systemic problem ignored by the native authorities. In truth, Fengxian, the county the place the lady lived, has lengthy had an notorious popularity for permitting ladies to be kidnapped and bought to males seeking to procreate.
By looking CJO, advocates discovered at the least two earlier instances wherein kidnapped ladies 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 instances from outdoors Fengxian, revealing a sample throughout China. One examine that analyzed 1,480 trafficking instances printed on CJO discovered that one-third of the instances concerned ladies with psychological disabilities, and that ladies 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 mild, 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 citing the Fengxian girl’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 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 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 instances. In 2022, the overall 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) had 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 recordsdata en masse. In only one three-month interval in 2021, CJO directors eliminated over 11 million instances, citing the necessity for a system migration. Based on one analysis undertaking led by Benjamin Liebman, a regulation professor at Columbia Regulation Faculty, 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 tools used for espionage” and “choosing quarrels and scary hassle”—the latter being a basic cowl for prosecuting Chinese language protesters.
