Types of Environmental Public Interest Litigation in China and Exploration of New Frontiers

Wei You, Shan Liang, Lei Feng () and Zexuan Cai
Additional contact information
Wei You: Law School, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu 611130, China
Shan Liang: Law School, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu 611130, China
Lei Feng: Law School, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610207, China
Zexuan Cai: The People’s Procuratorate of Chengdu Wenjiang, Chengdu 611130, China

IJERPH, 2023, vol. 20, issue 4, 1-21

Abstract: Since “ecological civilization” was written into the constitution, China has continuously strengthened ecological and environmental protection and innovatively established an environmental public interest litigation system. However, China’s current environmental public interest litigation system is not sound, especially since the types and scope of environmental public interest litigation are unclear, which is the core problem we aim to solve. To explore the types of environmental public interest litigation in China and the possibility of expanding new fields, we first used the normative analysis method to review the legislation of environmental public interest litigation in China and then conducted an empirical analysis of 215 judgment documents of environmental public interest litigation in China, and we concluded that the legal types and scope of application of environmental public interest litigation in China are constantly expanding. To reduce environmental pollution and ecological damage as much as possible, we argue that China should further expand the application of environmental administrative public interest litigation to improve the environmental civil public interest litigation system and adhere to the criteria of “behavior standards first, result standards second” and “prevention first, recovery second”. At the same time, through the internal connection mechanism between procuratorial suggestions and environmental administrative public interest litigation, the external cooperation between environmental organizations, procuratorates, and environmental administrative departments should be strengthened, and a new mechanism for environmental public interest litigation should be established and improved to accumulate useful experience in the judicial protection of China’s ecological environment.

Keywords: environmental public interest litigation; environmental civil public interest litigation; environmental administrative public interest litigation; types of environmental public interest litigation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/4/3273/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/4/3273/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:20:y:2023:i:4:p:3273-:d:1066746

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().