On The Standing Of Environmental Public Interest Litigation In China

China has witnessed a rapid progress of industrialization and urbanization since reform and opening-up; however, as the by-products of economic development, environmental pollution and ecological damage have become increasingly severe. Faced with the opportunity of economic boom and challenge of environmental crisis, China has enacted a large amount of environmental regulations. Yet, environmental crisis has not been eased despite the increase in the quantity of environmental regulations. The reasons are as follows. A vast majority of environmental regulations are rather vague, and therefore it is difficult to put them into practice. The fundamental reason lies in the narrow scope of eligible plaintiffs in China's procedural law system.Procedural law requires that the plaintiff must have a direct interest in the outcome of the litigation. However, due to the special nature of environmental torts, it is rather difficult or even impossible to identify the directly related person in some cases. Sticking to the theory of directly related person has kept a large number of people or organizations who are devoted to environmental protection from participating in environmental public interest litigation, which, of course, has an adverse effect on the advancement of environmental public interest litigation in China. Based on this, this paper focuses on the key issue in the construction of environmental public interest litigation in China, namely the standing of environmental public interest litigation, and aims to benefit the theoretical research and practice of environmental public interest litigation.In recent years, while some provinces in China have set out to introduce environmental public interest litigation into their judicial practice, they have been caught in a dilemma where there was no law to abide by due to legal vacancy in both substantive and procedural law. The standing of environmental public interest litigation is not only a heated topic in theoretical research and judicial practice, but the very basis of environmental public interest litigation system as well. Based on the analysis of the basic principles environmental public interest litigation and issues concerning the standing of environmental public interest litigation, this paper puts forward some suggestions on the advancement of the standing of environmental public interest litigation in China.This paper starts with the concept of public interests, and environmental public interests, deduces the connotation and features of environmental public interests, clearly defines the scope and types of China's environmental public interest litigation and discourses on the theoretical basis of it, which includes environmental public trust theory, environmental public goods theory, environmental rights theory and Attorney General theory.On the basis of the concept and features of environmental public interest litigation, this paper analyzes the criterion of ascertaining the standing of environmental public interest litigation, suggests to widen the scope of the plaintiffs in environmental public interest litigation and makes the best of individual citizens, prosecutors, environmental NGOs and administrative department of environmental protection to achieve the purpose of remedying environmental public interests. This paper points out the advantages and disadvantages of the different type of plaintiffs through conducting a research on the regulations and judicial practice of environmental public interest litigation.This paper includes people's procuratorates, environmental NGOs, administrative departments of environmental protection and individual citizens in the scope of plaintiff in environmental public interest litigation, analyzes conflicts of interests among different types of plaintiffs and suggests the cooperation in funding and litigation among different types of plaintiffs. Finally, this paper devises the mechanism for different types of plaintiffs in environmental public interest litigation.