The Supreme People’s Court has activated a new Case Database

On the 27^th of February 2024, the People's Court Case Database, also known as the "Case Database" (人民法院案例库), was formally inaugurated. The Database is an important consultation tool which contains numerous authoritative jurisprudential cases that the Supreme People's Court has selected to be of reference value for similar cases, together with guiding cases and reference cases.

Though this Database, the Supreme People's Court wants the lower People's Courts to check the new Database before formulating a verdict. The aim is, hence, to guarantee homogeneity in the application of the law, in the standards of judgement, in the construction of a Confucian socialist society governed by the rule of law. Through this Database the Supreme People’s Court wants to remedy the Chinese-style juridical problem of "different decisions in the same kind of litigations" in which the final decision results are dissimilar or conflicting with solved cases, as happened with the 2019 Beijing 0111 Minchu No. 21457 Civil Verdict judged by the Beijing Fangshan District People's Court and the 2021 Zhejiang 1003 Minchu No. 2034 Civil Ruling concluded by the Taizhou Huangyan District People's Court in 2021 about the virtual currencies or the 2019 Lu Min Shen No. 7156 Civil Sentence and the Lu Min Zai No. 935 Civil Case in the same year, both decided by the Shandong Provincial Higher People's Court about the pension law.

Since the Supreme People’s Court in cooperation with the other lower people’s courts started constructing this case database at the end of August 2023, more than 3,700 cases have been inserted in the Database and among them, there are about more than 1400 criminal cases, more than 1600 civil cases, more than 300 administrative cases, more than 10 cases of state compensation, more than 150 enforcement cases, more than 35 labor cases, including about more than 5 guiding cases and more than 25 reference cases.

As it is known, the People’s Republic of China has a codified legal system in which the National People's Assembly (全国人民代表大会) and the Standing Committee of the National People's Assembly (全国人民代表大会常务委员会) have the function to interpret laws. For this reason the 2024 People’s Court Case Database, not being a basic collection of binding court precedents, does not alter the constitutional and parliamentary order of the People’s Republic of China. Unlike England, having progressively moved away in the course of history through the power of jurisprudential cases from the legal schemes of civil law to give rise to those of common law, China is willing to remain in the Romano-Germanic Law even though guiding cases issued by the Supreme People's Court have a strong guiding role as happening in the Nordic Law System, in the Japanese Case Law system or in the Latin American legal systems. 

The legal foundation of the 2024 Case Database is not only art. 18 of the Organic Law of the PRC People's Courts (中华人民共和国人民法院组织法) according to which the Supreme People's Court might release clarifications on matters regarding particular execution of the law in trials by issuing guiding cases but also art. 7 of the Guidelines of the Supreme People's Court on Case Guidance (最高人民法院关于案例指导工作的规规定) according to which when examining analogous cases, the people's courts at all levels should make reference to the guiding cases issued by the Supreme People's Court.

Before the 2024 Case Database, the guiding cases of the Supreme People’s Court were catalogued in a protracted series of unstandardized jurisprudential compilations and the exceedingly restricted total number of published cases was not able to meet the needs of every single people’s court in every administrative division. Starting from the first issue of the collection of guiding cases in November 2011, the Supreme People's Court released so far about more than 30 groups containing about more than 210 guiding cases. In the last year, the cases given to the people's courts at all levels in mainland China were as high as about more than 4,500,000 and, in 2023, the Supreme People's Court dealt with more than 16000 cases.

The legal praxis of the Supreme People’s Court takes into consideration that there are plenty of extra-legal matters such as theological disputes which are difficult to be solved from a juridical point of view by simply relying only on its own guiding cases. For this reason the 2024 Case Database tries to indirectly regulate some extra-legal issues as China Judgements Online (中国裁判文书, https://wenshu.court.gov.cn/), opened by the Supreme People's Court, did starting from 2013 by publishing court verdicts whose web visits in 2019 were more than 10 billion and whose broadcast cases in 2020 were more than 100 million in order to construct an harmonious open and user-friendly judicial device by developing juridical dynamism and legal transparency throughout the nation.

The implicit idea of flanking the China Judgements Online with a new case database was conceived through the Guidelines of the Supreme People's Court on the Uniform Application of Laws to Strengthen the Search for Similar Cases (关于统一法律适用加强类案检索的指导意见) in order to improve legal correctness and jurisdictional validity of guiding cases which tried to respond to the intense criticism of China Judgements Online especially about its efficiency by Chinese judges.

The 2024 Case Database, following as a model the last developments of China Judgements Online, has a standardized system and, unlike China Judgements Online which covers more than 3,500 courts across the country, it doesn’t focus on merely a huge amount of summary proceeding litigations or minor claims cases managed by unimportant people’s courts with no influential value. Its creation is, thus, very important because the implicit purpose is to realize what President Xi Jinping stated: “[…] a jurisprudential case is better than a dozen administrative documents”.

In order to realize this significant and wise presidential citation, the cases included in the 2024 Case Database must strongly follow the principle of bureaucratic simplification and, hence, utilize the same format, containing number, title, subtitle, keywords, background, motives for judgement, the key arguments of the verdict and the related index in order to help judges find the cases they necessitate. Unlike China Judgments Online, in the 2024 Case Database a severe juridical scrutiny with a verified legal authority is guaranteed.

It is very important to point out that the cases included in the 2024 Case Database are “soft-binding” i.e. if a people’s court is certain that it is not convenient to refer to the relevant cases in the 2024 Case Database, caused by legal, jurisdictional or political modifications, it ought to report the reasons and bring its litigation to the trial committee for its discussion or present it to a higher court seeking for the processual jurisdiction according to the principle of Leninist Democratic Centralism. Moreover, it is important to point out that the 2024 Case Database is more accessible than China Judgements Online because the public can consult the 2024 Case Database after simply registering and logging in.

Through this Database, mediation is encouraged as implicitly required by the PRC Ministry of Justice (中华人民共和国司法部). Coming back to 2013 China Judgment Online, it will remain an ancillary tool of the 2024 Case Database.

At the moment there are two ways for gaining access to the Case Database: either that to use its website (https://rmfyalk.court.gov.cn) or, otherwise, users can click on the “People’s Court Case Database” icon on the homepage of the official website of the Supreme People’s Court.

On the 7^th of May 2024, the Supreme People’s Court issued the Working Procedures for the Construction and Operation of the People’s Court Case Database (人民法院案例库建设运行工作规程) in order to improve the 2024 Case Database, to optimize its digitalization and promote the socialist Confucian Chinese rule of law.

Concluding, as the German philosopher Max Weber has identified although too laconically, the factor that ultimately is decisive in the history of mankind is religion and in fact the "Neo-Confucianism of Xi Jinping with Chinese characteristics" is a structure which, indirectly through the 2024 Database, determines and conditions the socio-economic superstructure.

To quote this article, G. Genovese available at: http://www.cinalex.it/en/blog/p/the-supreme-peoples-court-has-activated-a-new-case-database