On The Protection Of The Public’s Right Of Knowing Environmental Information In China

Although the environmental group incident occurred in Shifang County in Suchuan Province on July 2, 2012 has passed, it leaves us so much reflections. This thesis takes this environmental group incident as the starting point to analyze the problems of current legislation and correlative system in China in protecting the public’s right of knowing environmental information, and then proposes relevant suggestions for improvement.Since the procedural environmental right represented by the public’s right of knowing environmental information in China fails to be guaranteed for a long time, the public can not guarantee their environmental rights and interests by legal means but have to resort to the unconventional way to realize the relief of environmental rights and interests. This issue is embodied in the frequently occurred environmental group incidents in recent years. The outburst of the event in Shifang, Sichuan is not incidental, so the attention should not be only paid to the conflicts in this event but also should be paid to the discussion on who is right and who is wrong between the government and the public so as to find out many shortages in the protection of the public’s right of knowing environmental information, realize the problems of the government and the enterprises in disclosing the environmental information and reflect the current situation of the right protection in China. The key to solve these problems is to improve the right protection of the public’s right of knowing environmental information. This thesis takes the event in Shifang as the starting point to survey the problems in the protection of the public’s right of knowing environmental information and put forward suggestions for solving these problems. This thesis centers on the right protection of the right of knowing environmental information, firstly conducting a case study on the event in Shifang, carrying out the specific analysis on the tort of infringing the public’s right of knowing environmental information and reflecting the current situation of the protection of the public’s right of knowing environmental information in China. The second part gives an explanation on the theory of the public’s right of knowing environmental information and puts forward the theoretical and practical meaning of protecting the public’s right of knowing environmental information. The third part analyzes the problems in protecting the public’s right of knowing environmental information from the aspects of current situation of legislation and correlative system implementation on the public’s right of knowing environmental information. The fourth part puts forward the suggestions for improving the protection of the public’s right of knowing environmental information from the aspects of legislative protection, public protection and private protection and attempts to set up the new right, the right of informed consent of knowing the environmental information so as to provide new idea for the protection of the public’s right of knowing environmental information.There are three innovation points in this thesis: firstly, it interprets the hot spot of society, the event in Shifang by means of case study; secondly, it proposes suggestions for improving the protection of the public’s right of knowing environmental information in China from three aspects, the legislation, the public force and the private force; finally, it attempts to set up new right to design the system of the protection of the right of knowing.