An Empirical Study On The Operation Of The Environmental Civil Public Interest Litigation Collegiate Panel

Environmental pollution incidents occur frequently,environmental judicial trials are gradually paid attention to,and environmental civil public interest lawsuits are becoming more and more effective means to protect environmental public interests.The introduction of the Law of the People's Republic of China on People's Assessors in 2018 has brought about major changes in the trial organization of environmental civil public interest litigation.A collegiate bench of seven consisting of three professional judges and four people's assessors is implemented.The system design of the collegiate bench of seven emphasizes the participation of people's jurors and their fact-checking functions,and how to realize the high-quality participation of jurors and effective cooperation with judges through the system design is the key to its system operation.This paper takes K City Environmental Resources Tribunal as the object of investigation,investigates the actual operation of the Environmental Civil Public Interest litigation Tribunal,and puts forward specific suggestions for improvement.Specifically,it includes four parts:The first part from the perspective of the classification of a collegiate panel to define the civil environmental public interest litigation collegiate panel seven people,according to the nature of members of the collegiate panel of different classification standard,the civil environmental public interest litigation in jury collegiate system,is called "seven people jury collegiate panel civil environmental public interest litigation",and further analyzes its characteristics and existing value,It lays the theoretical groundwork for the operation of the collegiate panel.In the second part,the Environmental Resources Trial Division of the Intermediate People's Court in K City was taken as the object of investigation.Through questionnaire survey,interview,trial observation and other investigation forms,the operation of the seven-member jury collegiate panel for environmental civil public interest litigation was conducted in stages to investigate the actual operation status.The third part makes a macro analysis of the problems existing in the operation of the seven-person jury collegiate panel for environmental civil public interest litigation based on the practice and research.The problems in the operation of the collegiate panel are concentrated in four aspects: the jurors selection mechanism,the separation mechanism of fact trial and legal trial,the judge guidance system and the evaluation mechanism.The causes of the problems in the operation of collegiate panel are concentrated in three aspects: legislation,judicial practice and the environment of jury system.In the fourth part,based on the analysis of the problems and causes of the operation of the seven-member jury collegiate panel in environmental civil public interest litigation,the author puts forward corresponding suggestions for improvement.On the basis of drawing lessons from foreign experience,this paper puts forward four suggestions to improve the selection and management of jurors,implement the separation mechanism combining practice with norms,promote the systematic construction of judge guidance,and improve the evaluation mechanism.