A Study On The Relief System For Victims Of Hazards Pollution

Presently, environmental pollution, especially the public hazards environmental pollution that affects a relatively large number of people and a wide area, has become an important factor that affects the healthy and steady development of our society. However, as the history of China's large-scale industrial activity is not long and we have neglected the environmental protection while emphasizing on economic development, the relevant legislation lagged behind and there is serious deficiency in the relief of the victims. In this paper, through a systematic discussion on the difference in relieving victims between general environment pollution and hazards pollution, learning from the experience of other countries in this regard, we try to explore on the relief system for victims of hazards pollution in our country.In this paper, by way of the empirical method, we introduce the serious pollution problems at present using the Huaihe River as an example. The pollution situation of Huaihe River is representative of the situation in China, where the pollution not only affects the lives of the nearby residents to some extent, e.g. cutting of the way by which some fishermen could make money, but also does great harm to the health of the residents. There has been violence against pollution in some domestic areas. Because the area of such kind of pollution and the number of victims involved are large, if handled improperly, the problem may threaten social stability, so it needs to be dealt with cautiously.Since China has not established a sound relief system of environmental tort for victims, it is hard for victims of environmental hazards pollution to defend their legitimate rights and interests effectively with the current tort system. The main reason is that China's current relief system of environmental tort was set up to deal with the general environmental violations, which failed to give adequate consideration to the special features of hazards pollution. Hazards pollution is usually not caused by one or several enterprises. Often there are many responsibilities for one problem, and the situation of each responsibility varies. This causes great difficulties for the victims to safeguard their rights and for the determination of responsibility. In addition, as far as responsibility components are concerned, the victims are at a disadvantage in the determination of hazard pollution damages and the causal relationship between damages and pollution actions. All mentioned above poses an obstacle to the protection of the victims in hazards pollution. If the victims are helpless, they tend to resort to violence and other illegal means to resolve the problem and protect their own interests.To alleviate social conflicts caused by hazards pollution, the establishment of a relief system for victims of hazards pollution is particularly necessary. After some in-depth investigation into the relevant systems of the United States, Japan, Germany, etc, based on environmental civil litigation of the United States and Japanese executive compensation system, combining China's actual situations, we try to construct the hazards pollution relief system with the before-incident part and after-incident part in this paper, aiming to provide some beneficial exploration for research on the system in our country.