On Setting Up Environmental Administrative Public Interests Litigation System In China

The original intention of traditional environmentaladministrative litigation exists double functions -----protecting private interests and making the administrative organizations act according to law. However actually, the system is tend to solve the litigation of relative part of administrative behavior unwilling to accept concrete administrative behavior .The meaning of relieving private interests is far more than the meaning of safeguarding and supervising the administrative action whether according to law or not. In the field of environmental protection, the action in practice is contrary to trend of protecting citizen's environmental rights, do not accord with the request for safeguarding the greatest interests either. Because of the particularity of the environmental issue, the influence of concrete administrative behavior is not merely on the relative people of behavior, but also on other people having nothing to do with the behavior. The coverage is so wide that other administrations are unable to compare with it. And, because the degree of environment deterioration is often closely related with limitation period of solving the problem, once the concrete administrative behavior has possibility of damaging the environment, the error-correcting function of lawsuit is particularly urgent. In the field of environmental administrative litigation, we can say that protection of environment public interests is far more than solving single case. With the development of social economy and individual rights standard shifted to social rights standard gradually, the protection of public interests has been on the agenda too. The proposition and development of the public interests litigation is reflection of public interests protection injudicial field.The legal system of public interests litigation originated from ancient Rome era, and had protected public interests indeed. However, the extensive concern occurred in the 20th century. The environmental public interests litigation first appeared in western developed countries , such as U.S. A. , etc.. Based on " private attorney general " theory, U. S. A. has established the clause of " Citizen Suits " in " Clean Air Act 1970, entrusted citizen to sue illegal person and delinquent Environmental Protection Agency according to law. Later a series of important environmental laws order citizen litigation qualifications through " Citizen Suits ", make citizen suits develop to some extent in respective adjusting field. In other western developed countries such an Japan , France and Britain, environmental public interests litigation are developing with their own characteristic.Because of the limitation of fundamental realities of our country, compared with western developed countries, there is great disparity in development of environmental administrative public interests litigation. From legal principle foundation, the constitution and laws of our country do not have clear provision about environmental rights . The regulations of entity law and procedure law are still deficient . It makes that environmental administrative public interests litigation has no provisions to apply to, no clear regulations at least. With regard to concrete system, " Administrative Procedure Law " of our country adopts " legal interested party qualifications theory in law ", of which plaintiff qualification and scope of administrative litigation narrows, not enough to meet actual urgent request of environmental public interests protection.This article proceeds from theoretical research and system...