Research On The Penalty System Of Environmental Crime In China

Since the economic reform and opening up, we have made a great achievement in economic and the socialist legal construction in the past forty years. While the society is developing, some issues which effect the sustainable development turn out. Among these issues, the most serious one is the environmental issue. From the water pollution incident in Sichuan Tuojiang River in2004to the fog and haze in2013, the environmental issues have been a serious threat to our people’s living conditions. Criminal law as the last bulwark of environmental protection has been favored by policy makers around the world. Our country had brought some serious environmental action into Criminal Law in1979, after then we have been modifying the law by amendments and judicial interpretation all the time. On the whole, the penalty system indeed takes effect in protecting the environment. But, there are still some problems in our environmental penalty system. Such as the species of penalty is too poor and the penalty can’t match the damage of environment caused by the criminals. These problems can’t meet the goal of preventing and combating the environmental crimes and affect the function of criminal law in fighting against environmental crimes. Therefore, this paper choose Chinese current environmental penalty as the research object, describes the basic theory of environmental penalties and then analyzes the characters and issues in our law,combined with Chinese environment crime legislation. At the same time, by introducing the legislation of penalty systems in some developed countries, we can make comparison between foreign legislation and Chinese legislation. And then take some advanced legislative experience to improve our penalty system of environmental crime, to improve the current situation of the serious environment and to highlight the features of criminal law to protect our environment.