Research Of The Mechanism For Settling Forest Rights Disputes

Forestland ownership dispute occurs when both or multiple parties have disagreement on the ownership and using rights of the forest and wood, and it has dual-characteristic of administrative and civil dispute. The diverse dispute solution mechanism is an adjusting system, which can match all kinds of social needs, consisting of various dispute solutions and its specific functions and characteristics, and it mainly includes non-litigation and litigation mechanism. Non-litigation is a series of ways for a party's personal choice in order to avoid formal litigation, and non-litigation of forestland ownership dispute is mainly composed with consultation, negotiation, administrative adjudication, administrative reconsideration and arbitration. There are two forms in litigation mechanism in dispute solution of forestland ownership, one is administrative litigation as against to the administrative judgment of the local government, the other is civil litigation caused by disagreement on forestland holding rights. Compared with litigation mechanism, non-litigation mechanism is more flexible, convenient and cost less, as a result it is widely used in solving forestland ownership dispute. While litigation way is the last choice when non-litigation mechanism does not work. Although it is much more complicated in litigation systems, it has a significant status in solving forestland ownership dispute due to its authoritativeness.As far as it has been seen in China, the deficiency of interaction between non-litigation and litigation ways lay a negative impact on the working of diverse solution mechanism. In non-litigation system, the results of negotiation are not stable, as the fairness is easily affected by the personal factors of settlers; and there is no executive guarantee and unified administrative adjudication procedure; further more, there are flaws in law supervision system in arbitritive way. However, the cost is too high in litigation ways. All these factors not only bring not so obvious effects to solution of forestland ownership dispute, but also set obstacles to the establishment of diverse solution mechanism.In order to make the diverse solution mechanism perfect, there should be a way to connect the non-litigation and litigation ways, including the association between consultation, administrative adjudication, arbitration and litigation. In the various methods of non-litigation solution systems, the fitted conditions should be strictly limited, the arbitrative organization should be well-considered, the connection of administrative reconsideration and litigation should be clarified, and unified administrative adjudication procedure should be established. Also, the litigation cost of the parties should be reduced in the litigation process. Therefore, all different kinds of solving ways can be fully used in forestland ownership dispute solution.