Civil Responsibility Of Environmental Infringement

Environmental pollution is becoming more and more serious in modern society and draws much attention from both the civil law and environmental law circles. The pollution events nowadays are characterized by the properties like power imparity of the subjects, helpfulness of the causing behavior, uncertainty of the causality and seriousness of the consequence, all of which impact the responsibility structure of the environmental infringement significantly.It should be noted that scholars employ the concepts of environmental infringement on multiple senses because the environmental pollution infringes upon multiple benefits of the people. The concept of environmental infringement used by the civil law scholars is essentially different from that by the environmental law scholars: the former focus the infringed objects on other people's property rights and personal rights, while the latter on the environmental rights in narrow sense. Many scholars use the concept based on both of the senses. The two conceptual environmental infringements possess different responsibility structure and contents, get different degree of acknowledgement and base on different theories. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish these two concepts.The special characteristics of modern environmental infringement make the "environmental torts " different with the general infringement in the responsibility structure. Environmental infringements change the rule of liability from negligence liability rule to no-fault liability rule, which is acknowledged by most of the countries in the worlds. Specific administration laws and regulations are not used as the criteria. Confining to the regulation for effluent discharge could not necessarily exempt the responsibility in the civil law. The complaints' tolerance on the infringement should be determined particularly and specifically, which will be applied as the criteria on the infringement's violating civil law or not. There also exist many theories on the determination of causality. Generally speaking, causation presumption principle combined with the specific situation should be used to judge the environmental infringement. For the joint illegal activities, it is very important to determine the degree of commons of therelevancy. Generally, Japanese scholars have done mature research on the liability rule of environmental infringement and we can borrow some useful theories from them.The responsibility bar of environmental infringement includes emergency danger avoiding, force majeure etc, while accidental events and legitimate defense in narrow sense can not serve as the responsibility bar. When the third party's faults exist, major faults and general faults should be recognized. Only major faults of the third parity can be accepted as a responsibility bar.The main responsibility of environmental infringement comprises of loss compensation and damage removal. It is becoming much more socialized due to the institution of insurance and compensation fund. Meanwhile, the compensation of non-pecuniary loss should be payed. Strict conditions are imposed for the application of damage removal. Many factors, including the seriousness of the damage, the illegal behavior and victim's tolerance, should be considered.These years, a new theory arises using the environmental rights as the basic concept to eliminate the pollution. Environmental rights emphasize the value of the environment. The final objective of all the environmental protection policies is the achievement of environmental rights. Both the environment administration and legislation should be focused on the implementation of environmental rights. In the environmental litigation, the environmental values should be recognized sufficiently. However, the author consider it inappropriate to render the environmental rights absolute value larger than that of all the other factors and regards them as gist for the suspending of pollution sources. Therefore, privatizing the environmental rights will face difficulties both theoretically and practically.