Commentary China’s judicial system is busy deleting and removing data on persecution—scrubbing them from its database—which reverses the only positive development for China’s judiciary in years. One of the few highlights within the Chinese judicial system, or possibly the only one, has been a slow—yet noticeable—increase in “transparency.” The main part of this has been the establishment of a database, called China Judgments Online, by the Supreme Court in July 2013. The database is supposed to publish verdicts from criminal trials. The database never included more than roughly half of verdicts, and the system allowed police, prosecutors, courts, and sometimes victims to request not to have their verdicts included—and, as a rule, it never published verdicts related to national security. Despite all this, the database provided researchers, including those at Safeguard Defenders, with invaluable data. Safeguard Defenders, for example, has been able to prove, using Beijing’s own data, that the Chinese …