Studying Environmental Civil Litigation Specialization

Environmental civil suit is a kind of specialized activities to address environmental civil disputes by courts through trial and sentencing, decisions, implementation. The number of civil disputes caused by environmental pollution is increasing with the rapid development of the market economy at this stage in China. The current environmental civil litigation system is still a part of the general civil litigation system, despite some scattered special rules for actions on the environment litigation prescribed in the Water Pollution Prevention Law, Air Pollution Prevention Law, Supreme People's Court on a number of provisions of Civil Procedural Evidence and other laws or judicial interpretations. Environmental pollution has characteristic such as legitimacy, universality, indirect nature, complexity, and the position of disparity between the perpetrators and victims, and the environmental civil litigation has specialties such as difficulty of registering, difficulty of proof, difficulty of implementation, and low rate of win, placed on file to prove difficult, the implementation of difficult, successful rate is low and long life cycle of litigation. There is a great difference between environmental civil litigation and general civil litigation. It is hard to resolve the environmental civil disputes effectively and fairly by using the ordinary civil litigation system. Therefore, it is a rational choice to push the environmental civil litigation to specialization to safeguard citizen's environmental rights and interests and to achieve environmental justice.There are several key links in the process of environmental civil litigation specialization. (1)The specialization of judicial organization means to set up environmental tribunal and environmental court to deal with environmental cases so as to improve the efficiency of hearing environmental cases and ensure the cases to be dealt with profession and consistent with the concept of environmental law. There are some typical foreign judicial organizations such as New South Wales Land and Environment Court, Bangladesh Environment Court and the Memphis environmental court. Guiyang, Wuxi, Kunming, Yuxi and other places also set up environmental tribunals in recent years. We think that the environmental tribunal should be set up only in the intermediate court or above and the environmental court can be set up depend on the circumstances. (2)The specialization of proof rules in environmental litigation. The Water Pollution Prevention Law, Air Pollution Prevention Law, Tort Liability Act and other laws provide for a proof rule in environmental civil litigation named reversed burden of proof. However, the proof rule does not reflect in the environmental basic law and it is not used in judicial practice constantly. Thus, it will help to protect the interests of victims to fix the proof rule of environmental litigation in amending the environmental basic law and to specific the means of the rule by judicial interpretation. (3)The specialization of environmental lawyer means the environmental lawyer with professional knowledge act as procurator to provide professional legal services so as to minimize the vulnerable position and injury caused by information asymmetry and other factors. The environmental lawyer is relatively developed in foreign and there are a few part-time environmental lawyers in China. But the environmental lawyer system has not been established in China and it is necessary to cultivate and train environmental lawyer and establish semi-public environmental lawyer system to shorten the gap between the victim and the polluter, which will helps the environmental civil cases to be handled fairly. (4)The specialization of institution of identification refers to the specialized agencies and professional surveyors analyze, judge and assess the facts in environmental civil litigation to solve the problem of hard proof. The specialization of institution of identification not only meets the need of judicial practice but also meets the need of the reformation of judicial identification. The specialization means both the establishment of specialized accreditation bodies and the cultivation of specialized personnel as well as professional management for the identification.The specialization of critical links in the above means to achieve the specialization of environmental civil litigation and the environmental civil cases will be handled more efficiently and fairly. The specialization of environmental civil litigation will safeguard the interests of victims and urge the polluters to improve processes, strengthen management and reduce pollution and improve the environment ultimately. That will help to maintain the health of all people and achieve environmental justice.