China’s justice system 2024 grows more opaque
safeguarddefenders.com
As the annual Two Congress meetings in Beijing conclude, both the Supreme Procuratorate (SPP) and the Supreme Court (SPC) have released their annual work reports, shedding light on China's judiciary in 2024.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/31732325

Safeguard Defenders, a human rights group focused on China, has reviewed data related to arrests, prosecutions, trials, and sentencing, comparing them with previous reports since Xi Jinping came to power.

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The only significant ongoing trend is the reduction in information provided in the reports, contributing to the PRC’s attempts to render China an informational black hole for outside observers, the group says.

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  • Transparency in China’s criminal justice system continues to decline as SPP and SPC reports remove key data (see below under each section) from their submissions to Congress.

  • To make matters worse, the China Judgments Online/Wenshu database—significantly flawed at its best—has effectively been discontinued as of 2024. Prior to this, an analysis covering 2013 to 2020 showed that 35-45% of verdicts announced by the SPC were missing from the database annually. Earlier analyses provide further details and context.

  • Since Xi came to power, China has seen approximately 18.5 million prosecutions, with its courts issuing 17 million verdicts (at the first instance) and with approximately 10.5 million arrests (not detentions).

  • No data of any kind exists on the number of people detained within the regular criminal justice system, only on those that police later seeks to have arrested.

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