Study On Environmental Criminal Liability Essentials

As the economy develops in the past few decades,industrial production has caused serious damage on the environment which human rely on.People has been ignoring how to protect the environment in the pursuit of economic development.People have not given enough attention on the protection of environment,nor taken practical measures which results in serious environmental pollution and destruction.The pollution has brought illness to many people and even loss of life.However,the administrative,civil,economic means have their limitations when it comes to environmental pollution issues.Therefore,only criminal law can play the role of the last line of environmental protection.In China,the requirements of liability is the essential precondition to confirm a criminal conviction.However,in Britain and the United States,for some special crimes(such as environmental crime),most scholars believe that it is the absolute responsibility that applies to this situation,that is,the law allows accountability even though there is lack of guilty mind.However,the author is more inclined to believe that it is not necessary to prove that whether the perpetrator committed the crime due to an obvious guilty mind since once the crime has been committed,there must be some reason that guided the perpetrator,and they have to take responsibility for the crime.In this paper,the intentional and negligence of environmental crime is regarded as a separate responsibility element.At the same time,combining with the responsibility of the general principle of criminal law,we study the environmental crime liablity essentials comprehensively and study the criminal constitution of environmental crime through the second-order theory.In addition,this article will give out examples of environmental crime liablity essentials,combining with judicial practice,to explore whether strict liability should be applied to China's criminal law practice,and clarify points that the author thinks does apply.