On Environmental Public Interest Litigation System In China

For quite some time, it has become a regular pattern for human beings to pursue economic development in three stages:development at the cost of environment; co-development with environmental pollution and development with environmental protection as the precondition. In recent years, environmental pollution and disruption are increasingly severe with the rapid economic development in China, some of which have been bad enough to cause great losses to people's health and property and even have put some inhabitants endangered. Some public environmental hazards, such as the benzene pollution in the Songhua River, the water pollution in Tuojiang River and arsenic contamination in Yangzonghai Lake, were not settled properly due to the serious flaw in environmental protection law in China, where civil environmental public interest litigation system has not been established. Consequently, the infringing parties in such cases were often fined as a result of administrative penalty, instead of being pursued civil actions. In practice,such infringing parties will rake in enormous profits at a rather low cost to break the law, leaving the society to pay the heavy price. Hence, it has become a huge task to protect the environment, develop an environment-friendly and resource-conserving economy and construct a harmonious relationship between man and nature. The author argues that an accomplished civil environmental public interest litigation system should be promptly established to back up the environmental judicial practice as well as the construction of ecological civilization. Grounded in the basic theory of the environmental public interest litigation, its relative experience practiced in foreign countries and the achievement in this field in China, this paper proposed an idea about how to form an ideal civil environmental public interest litigation system from the following four aspects:1. the outline of the civil environmental public interest litigation; 2. the legislative situations of it in foreign countries; 3. the current situations of it in China;4. the construction of it in China.