On The Protection Of Environmental Rights Of Peasants As A Vulnerable Group

The environmental rights are the new human rights. They are known by people gradually in the process which the global environment is worsening. They are already confirmed in many countries from the legal aspect. Nowadays, while the global environmental problem receives more and more attention, China's environmental problem's seriousness draws concern equally. The way that some cities sacrifice environment for economic development has been abhorred by the man of insight. However, the environment in our scenic rural areas encounters a more serious destruction, as a result of the harm done by the shift of urban industrial pollution and life trash. Peasants' environmental rights receive the huge violation. In the legal society with the ideas of fairness and equality, the protection of the peasant's environmental rights has great significance regarding aspects as maintenance of environment fairness, protection of peasants' rights to subsistence, upholding of Constitution's authority and protection of human rights, and has the vital practical significance specially at the reforming and developing time of socialism that advocates harmonious development between the human and the nature, and constructs the new socialistic countryside in the harmonious society.Great harm is caused to the general peasants' survival life because of the rural areas' environment continual worsening. As the social vulnerable group of China, peasants have little political and economic influence, which decides such status as easiness of rights to be violated, extreme insufficiency of rights' realization means, and difficulty to relief rights. However, due to our urban-rural dualistic structure system, peasants' rights are systematically melted away. Peasants as a vulnerable group compared with urban residents, given their environment participation rights, their environment rights to know, their environment rights of claim and so on, are protected insufficiently. With the help of scholar's empirical investigational data, this article illuminates present peasants' environmental rights realities such as few channels on environment rights to know, vacancy of the participation right, helplessness and passiveness on claims of environmental pollution, and all the above realities reveal the difficulty and problem facing the peasants' environmental rights protection. To protect peasants' environmental rights practically and thoroughly, we must give special attention and protection to them, we need to consummate the legislation to establish the citizen environmental rights legally, strengthen and improve the countryside environment on which laws and regulations implement, strengthen the protection of peasants' environmental participation rights and environmental rights to know, establish and improve the peasants' compensation mechanism, and act environmental public welfare lawsuit to safeguard peasants' environmental claims. Besides, such countermeasures are essential as improving the new mechanism of countryside environmental protection, guaranteeing the basic environmental investment in rural areas, increasing the ability of countryside pollution prevention and control, enhancing correlated propaganda to raise the environmental protection consciousness and to carry out the sustainable development idea as long as the socialist market economy develops. To achieve the fair and equal protection of peasants' environmental rights is a huge and complex project, which requires exploring a long way.