Research On The Crime Of Environmental Pollution

Environmental issues have always been the focus of the international community.Global warming,energy shortage,air pollution,and species extinction are threatening the living environment of human.As the largest developing country in the world,China' environmental pollution also can not be overlooked,which not only hinders the sustainable development of economy,but also endangers the health and life of human beings.Therefore,as for the criminal law,the last strong line of defence to protect human society,how to effectively regulate environmental pollution problems is the reality which needs to be addressed immediately.This paper intends to study the environmental pollution crime,which is the modification of the crime on major environmental pollution accident in the article 46 of the 8th criminal law amendment passed in 2011.The environmental pollution crime is the representative accusation of environmental crimes.The amendment of the articles of law enlarges the punishment scope of environmental pollution crime and greatly reduces the criteria of violating law.However,environmental pollution crime is a new type of crime in the background of times development,so there still exists some disputed issues in its understanding and application.In addition to the introduction and conclusion,this paper is divided into four parts.The first part is about legal regulation of environmental pollution crime.Thispart analyzes the environmental pollution crime from two aspects of legislative overview and the current judicial status.Marked by three important time nodes,legislative overview analyzes the legislative process of environmental pollution crime.Based on the judicial practice,judicial status summarizes the characteristics of environmental pollution crime in the process of judicial application,which lays the foundation for the later analysis of the disputed issues of this crime.The second part is about the protective legal interest of environmental pollution crime.Legal interest is the essence of crime,and knowing legal interest clearly is the premise of its proper application.This part first analyzes the different understandings of Chinese criminal scholars about environmental pollution crime.And then from the three perspectives of environmental ethics,namely anthropocentrism,ecocentrism,and sustainable development concept,this part describes the protective legal interest of this crime.At last,this part suggests that the protective legal interest of this crime should be built as the environmental legal interest on the basis of the sustainable development concept.Environmental legal interest can be divided into natural legal interest and human legal interest.This part also demonstrates the legitimacy of independent protection of natural legal interest.The third part discusses the legal issues of environmental pollution crime from the perspective of legal interest protecting.This paper selects three disputed issues of this crime.The first is accomplished form of environmental pollution crime.Based on the analysis of different views of scholars,the author thinks that this crime confuses act offense with consequential offense under the actual situation,besides,the author analyzes the confused state,puts forward the need to protect environment on the account of distribution and suggests this crime should set up potential damage offense.The second is the subjective fault form of environmental pollution crime.There exists negligence theory,intentional theory and mixed offence theory in academic circles.The author takes it into consideration that from the protective legal interest of environmental pollution crime to punish,its subjective fault should be intentional and the strict liability should not be introduced into this crime.The third is the penalty arrangement issues of environmental pollution crime.The traditional punishment haslimitation in regulating environmental pollution crime,for example,the single type of punishment,operability of fine punishment is not strong,and the penalty is too weak.Therefore,this paper advocates to apply the maximum legal term of this crime,adopts the limited fine system,and adds qualification penalty.The fourth part discusses the judicial application of environmental pollution crime specifically.The causal relationship of environmental pollution crime is proved to be a difficult point.If we continue to use the traditional causal relationship to proof theory,a large portion of environmental pollution crime will not get the proper punishment they should have,so the identification demands of the causal relationship of environmental pollution crime should be reduced appropriately,and the presumption principle of causality should be applied with the high degree of probability.There are certain differences in the way of illegal disposal stated by environmental pollution crime.This paper considers the disposed behaviors should be regarded as dangerous acts and further discusses how to distinguish the boundaries between illegal disposal and legal utilization in judicial confirmation.