china-public-sector-court-recordsChina has established the world’s largest online data platform to store court case information. The platform currently contains information from 91 million cases. 

During a conference about the intersection of Internet and law in Beijing on Oct 16, Wang Lansheng, deputy director of the Information Office under the Supreme People’s Court (SPC), said that the SPC spent three years working toward the publication of case information from all the courts in China. Wang added that four open platforms have been established under the centralized data management platform, Thepaper.cn reported.

The platform updates its information every five minutes, with 50,000 to 60,000 cases added daily.

It includes all cases, including newly accepted cases, archived cases, closed cases and pending cases, according to an official announcement on SPC’s website.  Zhang explained that one of the four platforms is designed for searching judicative papers.

Prestigious institutions including Harvard and Oxford have already used the platform to study China’s judicial adjudication.

Another platform offers public access to the implementation of criminal punishment, in addition to providing information about dishonest citizens. Currently, over 5 million people are included on the blacklist.  So far, 17 high people’s courts have set up information management centers and centralized data management platforms, utilizing data to conduct dynamic analysis and provide judicial commendations regarding economic and social development.

Source: People’s Daily Online