Analysis Of The Judicial Application To Environmental Degradation Forensic Appraisal

The forensic appraisal for the environmental degradation is compared as the “vital evidence” for the court cases in the subject of environmental tort.However,with the rapid growth of case numbers of the environmental tort,more and more issues have emerged during the judicial application for the environmental degradation forensic appraisal.Consequently,it is necessary to explore the solutions to improve and perfect the relevant regulations.This paper analyses the data,carries out the statistical analysis of the type of cases,analyses the issues from the three perspectives of scope,burden of proof and admission of evidence,and then proposes suggestions to resolve the issues from the law making,rules of burden of proof,rules of reviews,all in relation to the environmental degradation forensic appraisal during the judicial practices.This paper includes five chapters.The first and second chapters introduce the background,define the concepts and propose the questions of the researches.The third chapter mainly discusses the issue of the scope of appraisal in the judiciary.The issue in respect to the scope of forensic appraisal is reflected in the fact that its scope for the environmental degradation forensic appraisal cannot meet the needs of trial.The degradation risks and degradation to the non-property assets continue to appear in judicial practices,but the existing forensic appraisal does not include these two perspectives,and it is difficult to maintain consistency for the trials due to the lack of scientific basis,which is not preferable to the comprehensive protection of environmental rights and interests.It is recommended to explore solutions from the following two aspects: firstly,improve the legal scope of forensic appraisal and the legal evaluation system and technical specification system for environmental degradation,so as to provide the legal basis and technical support for adopting the scope of forensic appraisal;secondly,prior to the legislation is improved,clarify the scope of forensic appraisal through the guiding cases to provide the consistency for judicial standards.The fourth chapter mainly discusses the issue of burden of evidence in judicial practices.There are two issues in the judicial application of the burden of evidence of forensic appraisal:one is that it will be prone to result in the the questions in the legitimacy of the procedure,if the unilateral initiation of environmental degradation forensic appraisal is carried out before the litigation;the other is that the standardization and prescribed form of environmental degradation forensic appraisal have resulted in the extra burden in terms of degradation results and relevance for the plaintiff arranging with forensic appraisal in judicial practice,which not only increases the burden of proof and the cost of litigation,but also not conforms to the legislative setting of the rules of proof thus easily leading to judicial injustice.It is recommended to resolve the issues from the following two aspects: firstly,improve the pre-litigation entrusted forensic appraisal procedure by confirming the legality of the pre-litigation entrusted forensic appraisal while setting up procedures that safeguard both parties’ right to require the forensic appraisal;secondly,adjust and set the rules of proof,identify the degradation result from two perspectives to determine the liabilities: whether there is degradation and its size,and then set up the correlated evidentiary standards.The fifth chapter mainly discusses the issue of judicial admission of forensic appraisals.The issue of admission of forensic appraisal mainly lies in the lack of substantive review to the environmental degradation forensic appraisal by judges and the confusion between the factual analysis of forensic appraisal and the judge’s value evaluation(including the confusion of both the degradation facts and the causation).Judges shall revise criteria for admission of the amount of damage and causality,and standards for admission of evidence in view of no forensic appraisal,to achieve the balance between the initiative of judges’ discretion and the scientific nature of forensic appraisals,and meanwhile,to further improve the auxiliary adjudication system for environmental degradation forensic appraisals,such as creating a court system of providing consulting experts and expert jurors and and improving the system for appraisers to appear in court to testify.