On The Application Of Relative Strict Liability In China 's Environmental Crime

At present, the problem of environmental pollution our country is facing is increasingly serious. Though the Amendment of Environment Protection Law implemented on January 1,2015 is called the "strictest environment protection low in history", it still punishes polluters mainly through administrative means. Even though some clauses guide to deal with the behaviors of causing serious environmental pollution through the criminal law, the criminal law still can’t effectively punish this kind of behaviors of causing serious environmental pollution due to the reason of the criminal law.The so-called reason of the criminal law is that:Our country’s criminal law mainly identifies crimes in the principle of liability for fault. But, in environmental crimes, due to the profession of crimes and difficult identification for subjective faults, applying the principle of liability for fault is easy to make criminals escape criminal punishment. And the situation that nobody bears serious criminal consequences caused by criminal behaviors occurs eventually. So, this paper introduces relative strict liability to be applied in our country’s environmental crimes for the following two reasons:On one hand, relative strict liability has been applied in common-law countries and has a good effect on solving environmental pollution problems. On the other hand, through the method of reversing burden of proof, relative strict liability effectively solves the problem of prosecutor having difficulty in proving in liability for fault, and ensures that criminals will get corresponding criminal punishment. But, in order to introduce strict liability, it is necessary to solve the problem that it may has conflicts with the basic theory of Chinese criminal law:1. Whether restrict liability goes against the principle of correspondence between subjectivity and objectivity of the criminal law.2. Whether restrict liability goes against the modesty principle of the criminal law.3. Whether restrict liability goes against the principle of presumption of innocence of the criminal law. Restrict liability can be applicable to our country’s environmental crimes and be perfectly justifiable only after these basic problems are solved.This paper gives a discussion through three chapters, including:Chapter 1 Study on basic problems of environmental crimes; Chapter 2 Analysis on present judicial condition in our country’s environmental crimes; Chapter 3 Analysis on approach of restrict liability solving judicial difficulty in our country’s environmental crimes. Starting from the most basic environmental crimes, this paper raises the following questions and solves them one by one:1. What is an environmental crime; 2. What difficulty does the Chinese criminal law have in environmental crimes at present, as the difficulty needs to be solved using restrict liability; 3. What problems will restrict liability face when applying restrict liability in Chinese environmental crimes.