On Constructing The Environmental Public Interest Litigation System In Our Country

Public interest has two different meanings: one refers to social public interest; the other refers to national interest. As an independent interest form, the social public interest is gradually becoming the topic that people pay close attention to together. In our current laws, the social public interest is a common legal category. It is one of legislative purposes to safeguard the social public interest in our country.Public interest litigation, which originated from the Rome law, is gaining more and more attention resulting from safeguarding public interest. The American-led Western countries have already set up a sound public interest litigation system. Among our three current major procedural laws, only the Criminal Litigation deals with the crimes damaging national and social public interests and authorizes the Procuratorial Organ to bring the public interest litigation to the People's Court. But both the Civil Litigation and the Administrative Litigation belong to the personal interest litigation. This has hindered the protection for our social public interest seriously.Environmental interest is a kind of social public interest. With the development of economy, the environmental problem is becoming more and more serious. But the limitation of national administration and the defect of traditional legal system (Including substantive law and procedural law), make it impossible to offer an effective protection for the environmental public interest. At present there is a very relatively ripe opportunity to set up the environmental public interest litigation system in our country. Therefore it is very necessary to draw lessons from the western sounder public interest litigation patterns, and set up the environmental public interest litigation system with Chinese characteristics by innovating on the basis of traditional legal system. To construct the environmental public interest litigation system in our country, we should first found environmental right under the substantive law, then expand the plaintiffs qualification and the case range that can bring civil and administrative litigations, and take various kinds of rational and effective guarantee measures.