Prosecutorial Public Interest Litigations At The Grassroots-level:Difficulties And Breakthrough

With the passage of the amendments to the civil and criminal procedures in July 2017,the public interest litigation system was formally established in China.The legal interpretation,issued jointly by the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate in March 2018,explicitly established the concept of “prosecutorial public interest litigation” and accorded it with unique mission and rules.By November2018,all Chinese grassroots-level procuratorates have eliminated the absence of leads and case-filings in public interest litigation cases,achieving a nationwide full-coverage that is still burgeoning.However,as the statutes on prosecutorial public interest litigations have yet to be comprehensively developed,there have not been enough detail-oriented procedure designs and codes to guide grassroots-level procuratorates,the backbone of the public interest defense system,to resolve the problems and puzzles that arise in the course of handling actual cases.Therefore,it becomes a necessary and urgent issue to craft specific procedure designs in public interest litigations to address the aforementioned difficulties that grassroots-level procuratorates encounter.This thesis consists of three parts.Part one defines and clarifies the concept of prosecutorial public interest litigation and analyzes its value and characteristics.Part two investigates the legal practices from the perspective of grassroots-level procuratorates,identifies the actual and practical difficulties these procuratorates encounter,and analyzes the major sources of such difficulties.Part three examines constructive experiments that have been practiced by procuratorates handling public interest litigations in different localities across the country and proposes three strategies:establishing fundamental principles to guide the prosecutorial public interest litigation system,refining the relevant legal codes,and upgrading the supporting mechanisms.These strategic recommendations address the specific problems grassroots-level procuratorates face in daily practices of public interest litigations and would help promote and improve the public interest litigation system in China.