The Legal Protection Study Of Public Right-to-know Of Genetically Modified Food

Right to know is a basic human right in the Constitution, which is the basis of the legal protection of right to know to the Genetically Modified Food(GMF), at the same time, the legal protection of right to know to GMF is based on a series of laws and regulations, such as "Consumer Protection Law," "Food Safety Law," "Regulations on Open Government Information," and requires the participation of governments, public people, and food producers and operators. Of course, the realization of genetically modified foods to protect the public’s right to know law is not coming out of thin air, but has a profound necessity. From the theoretical and practical terms, the right to information under the social democratic constitutional theory, the modern theory of risk society, as well as genetically modified food itself influenced by cultural and social, political, economic and other factors, and are required to genetically modified foods to protect the public’s right to know law.Treating genetically modified foods, the United States and the European Union is two typical representative policies in the world. Through the study of both the relevant system I found that although the United States and the EU have very different attitude to the GMF, but in the approval of genetically modified foods and the decision-making process, they are both focused on procedural justice and have similar information disclosure and public participation mechanisms. They both protect the citizen participation rights and the right to information. In addition to this different attitude of GMF, the different policies of US and EU genetically modified foods also mainly lies in the competition of political and economic interests and the different development of gene transfer of biotechnology, their lessons inspire us to achieve food strategy with the balance of the legal protection of GMF’s right to know. Meanwhile, from a comparative analysis of the two systems and trends, it also can be seen that the legal protection of GMF’s right to know is the inevitable choice. And realizing the legal protection include disclosure of information, democratic participation, and labeling of the three aspects.China also has a series of appropriate laws and regulations to protect the public’s right to know of GMF. By sorting out these laws and regulations, it can be found that our regulations of GMF has regressed, and uphold a more relaxed attitude than before, the new change of "Food Safety Law" is only a compromise to the public voice in a form. On the whole, our GM food labeling system is not perfect, government information disclosure are conservative, one-way informing, and the boundaries between the disclosure and non-disclosure are blur. Public participation is a blank, although voice of the people to achieve high transgenic food information, but without resorting to route, claims of citizens generally exhibits scattered, individual characteristics, resulting in the influence very limited.From a variety of analysis, the legal protection of GMF’s right to know is not exist in isolation, it has inextricably relationship with a national food security strategy, the level of development of biotechnology, consumer and environmental protection, religion belief, and so on. In order to realizing the legal protection of GMF’s right to know, it is necessary to exclude the related factors, remodeling the concept of legal protection of GMF’s right to know, and then we can further improve the specific legal system, and guarantee the good execution of legal system.