The System Of State Environmental Responsibility

Responsibility system is necessary to all the legal systems. It's impossible to maintain one's legal right without responsibility system. State environmental responsibility system is resulted from the development of the state responsibility in the field of international environmental law.State environmental responsibility is that the state have to bear negative effect of international law because of the violation of its international environmental obligation. The international environmental obligation is the base of state environmental responsibility. Through the analyse of the origin of international environmental law, the author take the opinion that the international environmental obligation can be divided into two types and the violation of those would induce two different kinds of state environmental responsibility. In general, one type of international environmental obligation derived from the international environmental contract, which prescribes specific behavior rule of joining states. And the violation of it would induce international wrongful act which would lead to relevant state environmental responsibility. Another type originated from international common law, which direct the country should assume the obligation to prevent damages. It's specialized that states have "the responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment of other States or of areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction". The violation of it would induce the "international responsibility for injurious consequences arising out of acts not prohibited by international law", viz liability for the damages across the boundary.The state environmental liability based on wrongful act is that the state should bear negative legal effect because of wrongful act which disobey international environmental obligation. Establishment of the responsibility system would be beneficial to the law enforcement of the international environmental contract. This type of state environmental responsibility as well as the traditional state responsibility is based on wrongful act, for which it not only adopt the basic factors of traditional state responsibility but also has its own characteristic.Liability for the damages across the boundary is that the state should take on state responsibility to the victim or the delegate of the victim for injurious consequences across the boundary due to the acts not prohibited by international law, which is essential to the solution of the dispute arising out of the damage. It is the inevitability trend of the development of traditional state responsibility., and renewed it in the elements such as the theory foundation, the forms of responsibility and the international recourse.