The Revocation Of Administrative Acts

The revocation of administrative acts is a universal phenomenon in administrative law, but the connoation of administrative acts shows great uncertainties in legislation. Futhermore, there are many simultaneously mixed uses between revocation and various domains in practice. Therefore, it is necessary to define revocation in theory and make precise distinctions among revocation, suspension and cancellation in practice. Although Chinese mainland admits the distinction between invalid administrative act theory and the revocation of administrative acts in theory because of political system, legal tradition, value orientation and other reasons. However, in the legislative and practical level, it observes a policy of "the revocation of defective administrative action system". Although it is a common phenomenon for the administrative agency to exercise the revocation of its or his subordinates’ administrative in practice, it does not mean we can take the power of revocation for granted. The power of revocation adopted by administrative agency does not deduce from administrative act or supervisory power and it is power expressly granted by law. Based on different motivating forces of revocative procedure, there are two means of administrative revocative act, which are authoritative revocation and litigious revocation, but from the points of results, there are no essential differences on them. Thus, we can take the standard of litigious revocation as blueprints to model the criterion of authoritative revocation. The following are the typical examples of these standards, like lacking major evidence, violating administrative procedures seriously, overstepping one’s authority and abusing authorities. These seemingly simple standards shows great differences in the application so that it is necessary to combine the legislation and cases to give a vivid interpretation and explanation to the standards of administrative revocation. On the one hand,administrative revocation can uphold the law pure, on the other hand, it can shock the stability of the law to harm the protection of individual and public benefits. This double effect of revocative administrative acts means not all of them which meet the standards of revocation will be bound to revocate. To maintain the balance between various values of law and legal interests of law, the revocation of administrative acts should be appropriately restricted. The restrictions on revocative administrative acts come from the content of administrative acts, the duration of administrative acts and revocation itself. In addition, revocative administrative acts may trigger a series of legal outcome including restitution interest, elimination of negative results, compensation for damages and so on.Therefore, revocation of administrative acts should not only meet the revocation criteria, but also resrictly receive the limitation of behavioral type, revocation time and revocation procedures to maintain the balance of various benefits and values.