Related Investigation Report On Administrative Cases Of Disputes Over Forestry Ownership During Collective Forest Use Rights Reform

Along with the continuously deepening of the collective forest use rights reform, all kinds of adjustments about forestry related interests have intensified and so have the forest Use Rights disputes, resulting in more difficulty in dealing with those disputes for every level of the government as well as a new task for the People's Court during the hearing of administrative cases of disputes over forestry ownership. With the background of the collective forest use rights reform, I have made a special investigation related to the basic situation concerning those cases handled by the courts of the province since 2007 and a probe and analysis related to the features, causes of those disputes, issues existing in the administrative processing procedure of forest use rights disputes and new situations and problems encountered by the court of law during the dealing with those cases. Based on these, I also have put forward some suggestions and strategies about how to well handle forest use rights disputes. I hope this paper can help promote governmental administrative application, prevent and solve forest use rights disputes and guarantee the smooth development of the collective forest use rights reform in our province.This paper is divided into five sections:The first section is related to the general situation in administrative cases of the forest use rights disputes handled by the courts of the province. Based on the statistics of those administrative cases during the period from 2007 to 2009, I have summed up the features of those cases into five points: 1. There is a steady increase in the number of cases accepted but this number is not balanced in every region; 2. Those cases frequently occur in places of forest use rights administrative confirmation and registration and the number of cases remain appallingly high; 3. There is an benign interaction between the administration and jurisdiction and an preliminary establishment of disputes linkage dissolving mechanism; 4. The rate of the administrative organ's losing lawsuits is surprisingly high and further improvement of judiciary level and law enforcement is expected; 5. A small number of administrative organs lack the awareness and capability to response lawsuits and think little of judiciary suggestions.The second section is related to the features and causes of forest use rights disputes, which are of vital importance in terms of preventing and solving those disputes. I have summed the features and causes into five aspects: 1. Driven by economic interests; 2. Group-related; 3.Complexity; 4. Harmfulness; 5. Repeatability.The third section talks about problems existing in the administrative processing procedure related to forest use rights disputes. Through the collection and arrangement of typical cases, I have realized some common problems here to which great attention should be put through the collection and arrangement of typical cases. There are some blemishes or even breach of law in the indicted administrative acts due to the shortage of six kinds of awareness. These six kinds of awareness are: 1. An awareness of legal prescription of functions and powers, lack of which results in transgression over one's power; 2. An awareness of rule of evidence, lack of which results in the shortage of evidences of administrative acts and unclear or wrong findings of facts; 3. An awareness of due process of law, lack of which results in an distinct breach of lawful procedures; 4. An awareness of accurate application of law, lack of which results in incorrect application of law; 5. An awareness of reasonable administrative conduct, lack of which results in insufficient consideration of factors related to a case; 6. An awareness of due diligence, lack of which results in not performing their statutory duties or even failing to act.The fourth section is related to the primary problems encountered by the People's court when dealing with administrative cases of forest use rights disputes. Starting from the administrative judgment practice, I have made a summary of these problems: 1. Difficulty in collecting evidences, which results in court's difficulty in finding facts; 2. Circuity of litigation lawsuits, which results in a waste of judiciary resources 3. Unsound legislation and different standards for law application; 4.Failure in the administrative review part as a major channel to dissolve disputes; 5. Insufficient work of handling forest use rights disputes in the primary level ,which results in more difficulty in handling cases for the court; 6. Lack of uniform norms among various functional departments of the government to deal with problems left over by history, which puzzles the court when handling cases.The five section talks about suggestions and strategies in solving forest use rights disputes. Based on problems above, I have also proposed suggestions and strategies with different perspectives: 1. Government's ability and level of law-based administration should be promoted; 2. Forest use rights related legislation should be improved; 3. Administrative mediation should be made full use of to solve forest use rights disputes; 4. Judiciary standard for handling administrative cases of forest use rights disputes should be unified; 5. Diversified mechanisms should be built to solve the forest use rights disputes.