The Research With Regard To The Predicaments And Countermeasures In The Chinese Environmental Court's Juridical Practice

Since human entered into the industrialized society, especially with rapid development of the modern science and technology, all human beings are greatly threatened by a series of environmental problems, which are caused by excessive consumption of resources and over discharge of wastes. China is also a country with serious environmental problems. Now our country is suffered from degeneration of ecosystem, severe environmental pollution and sharp reduction of resources. Therefore, it is very necessary to protect the public's environmental rights and interests, and environmental resources through judicial way and to accelerate the construction of ecological civilization system. To establish specialized environmental courts and carry out environmental justice specialization is one of the main ways to achieve this goal. Because environmental cases have characteristics as latency, persistence and cross-regional, etc., these kind of cases may be difficult to solve, not only because of the long time and high cost and the requirement of specialized knowledge, but also because of the unique judicial concept, judicial criteria, litigation pattern, trial mechanism, rules of evidence, fact finding, damage assessment and mode of bearing legal responsibility. So only by establishing specialized environmental courts and setting up the lawsuit procedures, which conform to the characteristics of the environmental cases, can violators be held accountable by law, make up for the loss of the victims and the public interest, and effectively prevent environmental pollution and resource destruction.Although our country has not established the environmental court nationwide, in the trial practice, some places have already established environmental courts. These courts have the unique advantage in dealing with complex environmental disputes,which has achieved the goal in some extent to make the trial for the environmental cases specialized, to save the judicial resources and to improve the effectiveness of the proceedings. But at the same time, it also exposes some problems, which need to be solved. Therefore, this paper will discuss these issues.This paper includes four chapters:The first chapter summarizes the Chinese environmental court's juridical practice. This chapter mainly analyzes the realistic foundation, theoretical basis, necessity and feasibility of constructing environmental court in China, in order to fully affirm the positive role of the environmental court. And by combing the history of environmental judicial practice to prove that the establishment of environmental court in China is the trend.The second chapter: the current situation of the judicial practice of our country's main environmental courts. Although many provinces and cities have established their own environmental courts in various forms, the most representative environmental courts are in Guizhou, Wuxi, Yunnan and Chongqing. This chapter will take these environmental courts as examples to introduce the general situation of the court, jurisdiction, the scope of accepting cases, the judicial mechanism innovation and the situation of acceptance of cases.The third chapter is the analysis of the current situation of the judicial practice of the environmental court in our country. Through the research and analysis of the current situation of the judicial practice of our country's main environmental courts, there are some problems in the practice of environmental justice in China. Including: First, the environmental justice concept lags behind the trial practice; Second, the lack of legal basis restricts the effect of the trial; Third, the scope of acceptance of cases in environmental courts is not uniform; Fourth, the jurisdiction of the environmental courts is not consistent; Fifth, the environmental cases' litigation procedure relies on the traditional litigation mechanism.The fourth chapter is the measures to improve the judicial practice of Chinese environmental courts. This chapter will use the experience of some developed countries for reference, such as Australia, the USA, Sweden, etc., in the process of environmental judicial specialization. Some suggestions on improving the Chinese environmental court's juridical practice will be made by combining the foreign process with the current situation of the environmental justice in our country: to establish the modern environmental justice concept; to improve and unify the relevant legal basis, innovative ways of judgment; to clear the scope of the case; to improve the jurisdiction of the system and to adopt the ex officio litigation system. When all the suggestions are implemented, our environmental justice will become healthy and orderly.