The Legal Guarantee Of Enviroment NGOs In China

Environmental NGOs are nonprofit social organizations, dedicated to ecological environment. Due to their non-governmental character, non-profitability and voluntary nature, NGOs are playing a more and more important role in raising public awareness of environmental protection, promoting public participation in the environmental field and the realizing environmental rights relief. In China environmental NGOs are developing rapidly in terms of quantity and scale. Under the current laws, environmental NGOs are considered to be legal only after the censor and approval from the business superintend department and the register in the registration and management department. However, a large number of environmental NGOs can not be registered because they could not find any business superintend department to be linked to, thus they can not meet the requirement of "double management system" and cannot obtain a legal status. In addition, environmental NGOs are not given rights proclaimed in writing in the process of carrying on activities and playing roles, which has become a plight constraining the development of environmental NGOs.Considering the importance of environmental NGOs in the environmental protection and the distempered ness of current legal provisions, it is particularly important to use laws to deal with their difficulties and guarantee their development. In the United States, Japan and Russia, the legal guarantee has established a certain legal status and created a favorable environment for the development of their environmental NGOs, by endowing environmental NGOs with the rights of registration without prior approval, and the rights of receiving financial support and tax concessions. With the experience from other countries for reference, we can see that only by establishing a stable status for environmental NGOs through legislation and regulating their rights and obligations, can we guarantee environmental NGOs to better play the role in the environmental protection in a healthy development track.