Study On Moderate Strengthening Of Authority Principle In Environmental Civil Litigation Of Public Interest

The amendment and implementation of The Civil Procedural Law and The Environmental Protection Act provide a legal basis for environmental lawsuit of civil public interest. And its civil public interest feature demands for a moderately strengthened authority principle in judicial proceedings. The judicial interpretation issued by the Supreme People's Court on January, 2015 has made relevant stipulations on judge's interpretation right, Investigation and evidence collection of the court, entrustment evaluation, limitation on the litigant ' s disposition right and transfer of enforcement. These judicial interpretation, as the specific procedural rules for trails of the environmental civil public interest litigation, has substantially improved the litigation efficiency and conduced to a more just judgment. Yet, it remains to be further standardized, procedural and refined. Therefore, laws and regulations should be improved so that authority principle can better play a role in environmental lawsuit of civil public interest on one hand. On the other hand, “moderate”, which is the degree of authority principle strengthening, should be clearly defined. In order to solve the [procedural problem in environmental lawsuit of civil public interest, we not only need to reach the goal of environmental protection by way of litigation, but also need to maintain judicial authority through the combination of entity justice and procedural justice.Based on this perspective and the laws and relevant judicial interpretation issued in 2015, this paper studies the necessity and feasibility of strengthening authority principle in environmental civil public interest litigation and attempts to define “moderate”. Firstly, this paper defines the basic concepts and features of authority principle and environmental civil public interest litigation in order to further clarify the relationship between them. By doing so has not only proved the environmental civil public interest litigation cannot develop without the moderate strengthening of authority principle, but also analyzed the reasons for “moderate” strengthening authority principle. Secondly, this paper discusses the existence of the following problems including insufficiency in claims, difficulties in investigations and evidence collection and barriers in procedures execution due to the lack of authority principle and points out the necessity of moderate strengthening authority principle in environmental civil public interest litigation. Moreover, this paper analyzes the feasibility of moderate strengthening authority principle in environmental civil public interest litigation through discussing the advantages of moderate strengthening authority principle to the protection of environmental public interest, to the smooth advancing of investigations and evidence collection, to the proper execution of disposition power by the litigant and to the promotion of case execution. Finally, based on the current laws and judicial interpretations, this paper gives procedural rules on the moderation of expanding interpretation right and investigations and evidence collection right before the trial of environmental civil public interest litigation, gives refined rules on moderately limit litigant's disposition power such as lawsuit withdraw right, counterclaim right, conciliation and reconciliation right during the trail and gives moderate limitation on suggestions on the court's actively institute the execution process and gives specific execution suggestions to solve the problem of “difficulty in execution”. The author sincerely wishes these specific measures will promote the moderate strengthening of authority principle in environmental civil public interest litigation, therefore to further push forward the development of China's environmental civil public interest litigation, the entire environmental protection cause and even a more beautiful China.