Study On Private Plaintiff Qualification In Litigation For The Environmental Public Interest In China

China is now in the age of rapidly development. Frequently, the excessively pursuing of economic interests will leads to negligence of environmental problems which deserve more attention. Being the beneficiary of economic development, every citizen directly or indirectly becomes the environmental destroyer at the times of economic development which is at the cost of sacrificing environmental public interests.With the development of legal system in China as well as the concern of environmental problem Legal protection of Resources and environment has become a hot issue of social attention in our country. The public interest litigation system has been firstly established in the new version of Civil Procedure Law in 2012, in which the relevant organs and social organizations can field the environmental public interest litigation as the plaintiff. And then the prosecuting qualification standards of social organizations have been made in the version of Environmental Protection Law in 2014 and the Judicial Interpretation Law of the People’s Court on Civil Environmental Public Interest Litigation Cases in 2015.In 2016, Procurator Organs have been included as suitable plaintiffs in the Pilot Implementing Measures of the People’s Court on Environmental Public Interest Litigation Cases Filed by Procurator Organs. During these years, obviously, the development and improvement of Chinese environmental public interest litigation have been making great positive efforts to protecting our environment.However our lawmakers did not include individual citizens as the suitable plaintiffs of environmental public interest litigation until now resulted in that numbers of citizens who have high environmental protection enthusiasm have been lock out of environmental public interest litigation. This thesis aim to illustrate the feasibility and the necessity of individual citizens play a role of plaintiff in environmental public interest litigation by means of analyzing the historical roots, the theoretical foundations, the practical needs.The thesis point out the sever difficulties private plaintiffs facing in the litigation and the adverse consequences after expanding plaintiff qualification. Meanwhile, this thesis aim to design supporting legal systems to solve personal incapability and to prevent indiscriminate lawsuits through inspecting American Citizen Suits and learning from that. In addition to that, I also suggest that we can contact the private benefit lawsuit and public interest litigation on the occasion of maintaining the existing plaintiff qualification. In that way, the plaintiffs of environmental private benefit lawsuits can protect their own benefit and environmental public interests through the same judicial procedure.