Study On Civil Liabilities Of Joint Infringement On Environment

The expression “APEC Blue” became famous in November 2014 due to the Asia-pacific Economic Cooperation(APEC) summit in Beijing, which made the topic of environmental pollution and protection popular again. Although environmental joint tort cases only form a small part of all environmental cases, but they are indeed hard to handle. Environmental joint tort cases, in terms of their characteristics, are different from ordinary joint tort cases and independent environmental tort cases. In joint environmental tort cases, the sources of pollution are in various forms. The polluters are not easy to be defined due to the large amount. The victims, however, are weak; and the consequences are always serious. The responsibility of the polluters is dually among themselves and to the victims as a whole. The affects and influences of such cases are always serious. Because of such characteristics, joint environmental tort generates unique legal rules, which are special in the tort law family. Faced with such serious environmental joint tort cases and complicated disputes settlement process, theoretical analysis is still limited to the structure that ordinary tort cases adopt, which cannot give such phenomenon unique theoretical and logical analysis. This article is divided into three parts:the introduction,text consists of four chapters and epilogue.The first part is a definition of the environmental joint tort. In comparison of ordinary environmental tort and joint tort, the characteristics and types of the former are studied. Closely combined with the current domestic and foreign legislative policy and unique rules of environmental law, the nature and composition of environmental joint tort are under examination, especially the causality.The second part is mainly focused on the defects of the current responsibility regime of environmental joint tort, mainly on the bearing of responsibility, the principle of allocating responsibility, the sharing of responsibility and damages, which lays the foundation of the fourth part on suggestions.The third part mainly introduces the environmental joint responsibility regime of foreign countries and the ways how responsibilities are allocated, including Germany, Japan, Sweden, and some states of the U.S., and further go to the regime of China.Appropriate ways of allocating responsibilities should on the one hand cater to the benefits of the victims and on the other balance the social benefits, which is of great importance.The fourth part gives suggestions on perfecting the environmental joint tort responsibility in China, and hopefully it can provide some insight into the research and legislation in this field.