A Study On Legal Issues Of Information Disclosure Of Emergent Environment Incidents

Emergent environmental incidents are defined as “environmental incidents which happen suddenly; cause or possibly cause heavy casualties and property loss; threat and damage the economic and social stability, the political stability of certain region or throughout the country; have significant social impacts, which involve public security issues” Publicity, emergency, high risk and complexity are the distinctive features of emergent environment incidents. Meeting an emergency of emergent environment incident refers to a series of measures legally involving all members of the society under the guidance of government, including environmental monitoring, preventing, forewarning, emergency preparation, emergency rescue, reconstruction, etc., Its aim is to reduce and prevent emergent environment incidents; protect the people’s personal and property security; control, reduce, and deal with probable damages caused by emergent environmental incidents in various aspects. Among them, information disclosure of emergent environment incidents has the feature of passiveness. Its particularity lies in that it is not the result of government’s active contingency plans or arrangements. What is more particular is the difficulty of the realization of the balance between the expansion of authority and the limitation of rights. Current laws and regulations of our country such as Act on Tackling Emergency Affairs, Regulations on Government Information Disclosure, Report Measures for Environment Information(Trial), and Contingency Plan of Emergent Environment Incident involve the information disclosure issues of emergent environmental incidents.Information disclosure of emergent environment incidents basically involve legal issues in the following three aspects: legal subject issues, legal procedure issues and accountability mechanism issues. Firstly, in legal subject issues, while dealing with emergent environment incidents, our country does not have a unified subject information disclosure. Secondly, in legal procedure issues, currently the stipulations of content and time limit of information disclosure of emergent environment incidents are not complete enough contemporarily. Thirdly, in accountability mechanism issues, there are problems like ambiguous legal liability and insufficient relief in information disclosure of emergent environment incidents.Among the range of the whole world, legislation of information disclosure of emergent environment incidents in the US is the most developed and experienced. The US enhances its legal regulation from the following aspects: the establish a complete and operable legal system, the formulation of a unified information disclosure institution, and the establishment of an effective information communication and cooperation mechanism between enterprises and the government.To improve the current legislation of information disclosure of emergent environmental incidents, measures should be taken in the following aspects: to establish a unified information disclosure system, to form a clear operation specification on information disclosure and to improve relief and accountability system after incidents happening.