| Public interest litigation, which is opposed to private interest litigation, originated from Roman law. All private interest litigation is to protect personal rights of litigation, and can only be filed by specific talents; Public interest litigation is litigation for the protection of social public interest, and can be filed by every citizen, unless otherwise is specified in the law. Public interest lawsuit is generally divided into two categories:public interest litigation in the narrow sense and general public interest litigation. The former refers to the kind of public interest lawsuit filed by state organs on behalf of the state and in the name of the country with regard to behaviors violating national and social public interests. General public interest litigation, consists of not only the above-mentioned lawsuit filed by state organs, but also any other public interest lawsuit filed by specific person or organizations in their own names.Civil public interest litigation, refers to lawsuits filed before a people’s court by specialized state organs, social organizations or citizens in accordance with the law, when in the process of civil activities, certain behaviors violates the civil law, infringes upon state and social public interests, or poses a potential threat to state and social public interests. By complying with the procedure of lawsuit, civil public interest litigation helps to safeguard state and public interest. Civil public interest litigation broke through the limitation of traditional theory of parties of eligibility, and to a certain extent fills the gap of public interest protection. However, there is still only a handful of regulations about civil public interest litigation in our current law system, which is far from meeting the increasing requirement of regulating illegal public behavior and the demand of judicial practice. The author in this article analyzes the legislative and judicial status quo of the plaintiff system of civil public interest legislation in our country, deeply recognizes the great harm illegal public behaviors have done to the state and the society, and then points out the necessity of perfecting the plaintiff system of civil public interest litigation of China. It is not only out of the urgent need of safeguarding national and social public interests, but also is the inevitable choice of constructing a socialist country under the rule of law as well as an important way of protecting human rights.The article then goes on to put forward measures of perfecting our country’s plaintiff system of civil public interest litigation, which is to build a diversified plaintiff system of civil public interest litigation. It calls on the legislation to clearly give prosecutors the plaintiff qualification of public interest litigation, and endows relevant public welfare social organizations and citizens themselves the rights to file public interest litigation under certain conditions. In this case, not only those law-specified authorities and relevant organizations can file civil litigation, individual citizens can also raise the sword of public interest litigation to safeguard national and social public interests under certain conditions. In addition, this paper conducts further research on the condition and procedures of public interest litigation filed by "law-specified authorities and relevant organizations" according to the Civil Litigation Law, with an aim to make them more feasible in judicial practice. |
