(Yicai) Dec. 21 -- A new limited-access database of Chinese court judgments will go live at the start of next year. Its advent has thrown into question the future of a free resource that is open to the public, giving rise to opposition from legal experts who believe improvements to the system are needed.

The National Court Judgment Document Database will come online in January 2024, according to a recent directive from the Supreme People's Court. Unlike China Judgments Online, a 10-year-old open-access system, access to the new database will be limited to personnel in the judicial system.

The decisions of courts at all levels have been uploaded to China Judgments Online since the start of 2014, except those involving state secrets, personal privacy, minors, and cases concluded through mediation.

The site had more than 20 billion visitors in November 2018. Courts uploaded on average nearly 50,000 judgments every day that year, with a record 370,000 added in a single day. But since 2019 the publishing rate has declined.

Since the second half of last year, the number of publicly available administrative and criminal judgment documents has sharply decreased, with almost no online publication of administrative cases this year, Huang Qihui, an expert in administrative law and a tutor at Wuhan University’s law school, recently told Yicai.

There are a few reasons. Uploading judgments puts a heavier workload on judges because the public may magnify document flaws, the parties involved are afraid of privacy leaks, and local governments are reluctant to disclose judgments because they want to safeguard national security and the government's image, He noted.

Many court records also have not been made public in recent years partly because similar cases in various regions may have judges making different rulings, negatively impacting the judiciary's credibility, Huang said. Publishing some cases may also infringe on the parties' privacy rights, impair corporate goodwill, leak commercial secrets, or have other adverse effects, Huang added.

Making court judgments publicly available embodies the principle of a public trial, according to Wu Hongyao, a professor at the National Institute of Legal Aid of China University of Political Science and Law.

The information available to the public may dry up further if China Judgements Online is not retained, Huang said. That would undermine judicial transparency, hinder judicial supervision, and could even lead to the abuse and deviation of judicial power, he added.

It is imperative that besides the setup and start of an internal national database, some systematic safeguards and technological optimizations are promptly implemented for the data open to the general public, Huang said.

The shortcomings of the open system can generally be made up for by improving the rules, enhancing the technology, and clarifying the basis, He Haibo, a law professor at Tsinghua University, said at an industry conference in November.

Editor: Martin Kadiev