Legal System Of Environmental Information Disclosure In China

With the worldwide environmental problems become more and more serious, environmental protection has been concerned by all the countries. Environmental information disclosure as a new type of environmental management tools following the command control means and economic instruments is not only important for government environmental management, but also played an important role to regulate the behavior of enterprises. And environmental information disclosure is also an effective guarantee of public participation in environmental protection. Countries all over the world promulgated environmental information disclosure laws and regulations to improve the disclosure of environmental information system to promote environmental protection.The publishment of "Regulation of the People’s Republic of China on the Disclosure of Government Information" and "Measures for the Disclosure of Environmental Information (for Trial Implementation)" in2007made Chinese environmental information disclosure legislation scale to a new level. The "Measures for the Disclosure of Environmental Information (for Trial Implementation)" has been implemented for almost four years and has made a lot of encouraging results, but in practice there have been many problems which exposed some shortcomings in Chinese environmental information disclosure legislation. This paper is based on the current theory of environmental information disclosure with the introduction and analysis of foreign-related systems in the discourse on environmental information and the current legal system environmental information disclosure in China. And, this paper attempted to find out the existence problems of environmental information disclosure legal system and give some suggestions.Firstly, on the basis of a lot of reading literature on the theories of environmental information disclosure, this paper explained the relevant concepts and analyzed the theories of environmental information disclosure. This paper also collected and summarized existing laws on environmental information disclosure system of China.Secondly, in order to understand the status of national environmental information disclosure system better, and to facilitate reference and study, this paper through collecting and analyzing of a large number of foreign materials discussed several important national environmental information disclosure systems. They are the United States the European Union and Indonesia.Thirdly, this paper through analyzing the authorized investigation reports and summarizing the above discussion and existing laws found out the deficiencies of Chinese environmental information disclosure system. Finally, this paper gave some suggestion to improve environmental information disclosure legal system of China which including:improve the level of legislation; select special legislation mode; broaden the main body of the government and corporate information disclosure; clear the scope of government and corporate information disclosure; refine the procedures of government environmental information disclosure; set up a special chapter to require enterprises’disclosure of information of emergency environmental incidents; strength the intensities of supervision and sanctions of corporate environmental information disclosure; clear public right to know environmental information and improve their relief mechanism.This paper is written four years after "Measures for the Disclosure of Environmental Information (for Trial Implementation)" came into effect. It’s a discussion of existing laws of environmental information disclosure. This paper used many foreign-related information as well as some specialized institutions’research results to analyze the relevant problems. The author of this paper hopes that there will be more and more people participate in researching this issue and make greater efforts on environmental information disclosure system of China.