Author丨Wang Tairen
Ph.D. candidate in criminal law, Renmin University of Chinese
Since its establishment, the vast majority of judgments and rulings can be found on the website. However, in recent months, many voices have speculated that the judgment document network is "unfinished". The basis is that since 2021, the number of documents published online for judgment documents has fallen off a cliff.
In 2020, there were more than 23 million online documents, and now it is almost a year old, and in 2023, only more than 3 million judgment documents have been made public. Not only have the number of new cases decreased, but old judgments have also been withdrawn, and many legal colleagues have reported that many judgments that have been seen on the website are no longer searchable when they try to find them.
Just when everyone thought that the online judgment document would become a swan song, things have reversed to a certain extent. Yesterday, a red-headed document from the General Office of the Supreme People's Court circulated on social platforms, clearly stating that the "National Court Judgment Database" will be launched in January 2024, and only court personnel can check it on the intranet.
If this work goes smoothly, then the judgment will not stop going online, but will go inward. It's not that the courts don't need to put the judgments online, it's that lawyers, academics, the public, and even prosecutors outside the courts can't access them.
Reminiscences: Fond memories of the verdict made public
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the online launch of judgment documents, and in the past ten years, the disclosure of judgments has achieved tremendous social benefits, which are worth commemorating and reviewing.
The relevant person in charge of the Supreme People's Court has said three points:
The first is to protect the right to know and improve judicial transparency, "Sunshine is the best antiseptic, and the publication of judgment documents on the Internet can effectively avoid the occurrence of human favor cases, relationship cases, money cases and other phenomena." ”
The second is to improve the professional level of judges, "every judgment document will be subject to the inspection and comment of the people, and judges must be more cautious in the trial of every case." ”
Third, it will "help promote the unification of the application of law and adjudication standards of courts across the country." ”
For lawyers, document disclosure also improves the quality of service. In order to ensure that the same case is adjudicated in the same case, the mainland has established a reference system for similar cases, which the court can refer to when adjudicating similar cases in which a higher court or this court has already adjudicated. With the help of online case retrieval, lawyers on both sides can use the effective judgment as the basis for fighting for the legitimate rights and interests of the parties, which greatly improves the efficiency and reasonableness of representation or defense.
In addition, many local courts have internal rules such as "clear documents" that affect the outcome of cases, but are not known to people outside the court. Only by reading the documents on the Internet can an experienced lawyer summarize the value tendencies of the local court and guide the parties in the right direction.
For scholars, the publication of documents greatly improves the quality of research. Public adjudication documents can enable legal scholars to break through the shackles of the ivory tower and intuitively understand the problems that exist in reality. What are the real questions and which are false questions are not in the textbooks, and can only be learned from practice.
Although most of the effective judgments are not of high quality and reasoning are not strong enough, at least the online use of documents has enabled researchers who cannot personally participate in judicial practice to have a target, which has greatly promoted the process of autonomy of mainland legal theory. Not only that, but also gave birth to disciplines such as "computational law", and some scholars have used big data tools to carry out useful statistical analysis of massive documents, which has promoted the diversified development of legal research.
Figure: The homepage of "China Judgments and Judgments".
For the general public, the disclosure of documents reduces information gaps and expands freedom of movement. During the feudal period, the royal power once restricted the freedom of the people through the mystification of the law. ”
Today, China is not only a country with written law, but also a society in which the judiciary and trials are open through the law. The public has the right to observe the case, and can even watch the live broadcast of the trial online, and can only be heard in public when the case involves state secrets, personal privacy, and commercial secrets. The disclosure of judgment documents is the inevitable result of trial disclosure, and the full online access of documents is the inevitable outcome of document disclosure under the development of information networks.
The China Judgments Network actively embraces the information network, but avoids the risks brought by private dissemination. The law is cold, and it is the living cases that constitute the legal reality.
The dissemination power of the Internet is so strong that it is not in line with objective laws that judicial openness and judgment documents are not made public. Although the non-disclosure of judgment documents does not lead to the complete inaccessibility of judicial trials, it undoubtedly greatly increases the difficulty for ordinary people to understand judicial operations.
Pain Now: Why Papers Are Not Online?
There are three main reasons for supporting the non-disclosure of judgment documents at present:
First, there is a large amount of work on the Internet, which creates a burden on judges.
Second, the Internet of documents violates privacy and information security.
Third, the public's questioning of the verdict has brought trouble to judicial work.
The first point would have been the most convincing, because the hard work of judges is seen with their own eyes and heard with their own ears. Moreover, the Supreme People's Court's document clearly requires regular inspection and reporting of the "coverage rate", that is, the percentage of documents actually online. This shows that, at least in the eyes of the Supreme Court, all documents are operable on the Internet and do not conflict with normal trial work.
The second reason is far-fetched. From the perspective of personal privacy, the judgment document is not directly online, but must first be desensitized and personal information hidden. The online documents only show the basis and conclusion of the court's decision, and are not more sensitive than other information on the Internet.
Even in very special circumstances, some personal information can be inferred based on the facts of the case, such as time and place, and it can be resolved by improving technology, strengthening information protection, and punishing information abusers. Moreover, 100% of the judgment documents have not been uploaded online, and cases that the court considers to be more sensitive or may have a significant impact and controversy have not been uploaded.
The trouble mentioned in the third reason is to a large extent related to the general lack of clarity in mainland judgments.
Perhaps due to various reasons, such as time constraints, difficult cases, and insufficient theoretical level, the long-standing phenomenon on the mainland is that a large number of judgment documents only list a few legal provisions in addition to the facts, lacking necessary argumentation, and this can easily lead people to question the legitimacy of the conclusions. However, this phenomenon has improved markedly in recent years, and many judgments have won unanimous praise for their clear logic and thorough reasoning.
It is clear that the disclosure of documents can motivate serious and responsible judges and promote a general improvement in the level of judgment, and the questioning of certain crude documents is only an incentive for judges to improve their standards, not a reason to cut off public scrutiny.
Looking to the future: "internal checkability" may be more harmful than "non-disclosure".
The impact on lawyers, students, and researchers is obvious, and many people have already talked about it. In addition, I am more concerned that if the judgment document is only "internally available", it may cause more problems than "full non-disclosure".
When universal access rights are only available to judges, rent-seeking and inequality can flourish. Will those who have access to the verdict make a profit from this? Will it lead lawyers and scholars to "find connections" in their normal work and research? Will only those who are wealthy or "have the resources" be able to occupy an advantageous position in the trial?
These fears are not unfounded, as a recent example is that university campuses are no longer open to the public after the pandemic, and on-campus students with reservation access have become privileged. Subsequently, the reselling of reservation places by students has repeatedly made the news, and it has slowly become the norm for "related households" to enter the school.
There are other hidden dangers in the judgment on the intranet. Visible only internally, meaning that redaction is not required, and document leakage can have a greater impact. In addition, how to deal with judgments made public on the Internet by the parties concerned? If the lawyer presents a judgment of a similar case in court, can he refer to it, and whether it is considered to be illegally obtained? I am afraid that these problems will not be easy to solve.
At present, the "National Court Judgment Database", which can only be checked internally, has not yet been put into use, and there is still room for a full restart of the judgment document network. Is it to protect the public's right to inspect judgment documents, and to include them in the group of judges? There is an urgent need for clearer and more transparent policy explanations to alleviate everyone's anxiety.
This article is a special original manuscript of the Comment Department of Phoenix.com, and only represents the author's position.
Editor-in-Chief|Chang Le