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 truth, Fengxian, the county the place the girl lived, has lengthy had an notorious repute for permitting girls to be kidnapped and offered to males seeking to procreate.
By looking out CJO, advocates discovered at the least two earlier instances during which kidnapped girls 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 examine that analyzed 1,480 trafficking instances revealed on CJO discovered that one-third of the instances concerned girls with psychological disabilities, and that girls have been typically offered for lower than $10,000. All this info was obtained from the publicly accessible 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 lately, with folks repeatedly citing the Fengxian lady’s identify for months and pushing the federal government for an evidence.
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 change into a helpful supply of knowledge on Chinese language firms, with folks 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 instances. In 2022, the entire 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 12 months.
Across the identical 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 line with one analysis undertaking 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 gear used for espionage” and “selecting quarrels and upsetting bother”—the latter being a traditional cowl for prosecuting Chinese language protesters.