Wu's house has already been forcibly sold by court to pay off her ex-husband's debt. (Photo provided to CGTN)
Burden of proof
Wu has been working with her lawyer to request a counter-appeal from the prosecutor's office, but they have little hope for success. That's because the burden of proof specified by Article 24 makes overturning such cases virtually impossible.
"In law, we should only prove things that happened but not something that didn't happen," said Liu Xue, Wu's lawyer. "In this case, we are required to prove that the debt was NOT used for their married life. Article 24 is in fact a legal presumption, which exempts creditors' burden of proof in the first place. However, a presumption doesn't always tally with the facts, so the judge should base on facts at the end," he said.
Family lawyer Wu Jiezhen said that Article 24 was intended to protect creditors' interests and prevent couples from escaping legitimate debt by getting a divorce, but good intentions can generate unintended harms.
"If we are all aware of such a system where one spouse has no way to avoid the secret debt the other borrows, the trust and security in marriage will be gone," Wu said. "We talk about transaction security – creditors are now secured, but what about marriage? If marriage becomes an unsecured system, it will deeply hurt any couple and society as a whole," he added.
Article 24 victim support group
Members of a support group in Guangzhou meet regularly to provide each other with help.
These women are all divorced and their experiences are similar. Their ex-husbands took out loans behind their backs and mostly spent the proceeds on gambling. All of the involved courts ruled that the women must repay their former husbands' secret debts.
Most of the women's cases have already been adjudicated and can't be appealed. Still, the women continue to push for legislative changes.
"We don't know if the IOUs and subpoenas we are getting right now are the last ones," said Liang Nvzhu, the liaison for Guangdong's Article 24 Victim Support Group. "Only by changing the law, can we protect our children and ourselves. Also, since we are already victims, we don't want our friends and family to encounter the same experience and get hurt by some malicious people who might want to take advantage of Article 24. That's our motivation to change the law," Liang said.
Journalist Li Xiuping is one of the founding members of the Article 24 Victim Support Group. She works for a state newspaper in Beijing and is burdened with 5.8 million yuan of debt her ex-husband took on without her knowledge. The court already froze her salary for six months and put her apartment up for forced sale.
Li worked with several other divorcees to conduct a nationwide survey in April. More than 1,100 respondents from 29 provinces provided their real names and court files for the cause.
"We found that the 1,000 respondents came from all walks of life," Li said. "More than half worked for public institutions and more than 80 percent received higher education. They are actually the backbone of society. The creditors also showed clear patterns. More than half of them were professional lenders. Half of the debts were larger than 1 million yuan, some were 500,000 yuan in smaller cities. They clearly exceeded what we call families' daily spending," the journalist said.
The survey also showed that only 1.7 percent of the 700 respondents who had their cases settled successfully appealed. The former spouses face tremendous difficulty in meeting the burden of proof under the current judicial explanation.
