| China is one of the earliest countries mining of coal resources in the world. The coal production and consumption in China also ranks on the top level over the other countries. At the same time,the coal mine accidents occur often in China as well.With the rapid development of economy, coal demand grows with each passing day. The over dependency on the coal resources for economic development, and people’s greed for coal industry high profits, majorly contribute to constant coal mine accidents, which bring thousands of life loss, sorrow to their relatives and damage to nation’s possession. However, the criminal liabilities of liable persons are not always accounted. They do not pay enough costs to remedy mistakes they have made, which results that coal mine accidents happen again and again. These years our country has been working very hard on promoting coal mine production safety, and achieve results, but the coal mine production safety situation is still hardly optimistic as with unstopped accidents. The dilemma of coal mine production safety shows the severe problems in criminal liability accountability of coal mine production safety. This paper will analyze the issues about coal mine production safety on criminal liability accountability. Several experiences and practice used in advanced countries will also be learnt. Hoping it would provide solutions to China’s legislation or juridical practice.The paper divides into four parts:In the first part, this paper addresses the issues from China’s coal mine production safety and the criminal liability accountability. This part also divides into two small parts. In the former one, the paper provides enough data to indicate that the current situation of coal mine production safety is still unoptimistic. In the latter one, the paper states some practical phenomenon after the accidents, and points out some problems in criminal liability accountability.In the second part, several legislative defects in coal mine legislation and criminal law are indicated. After the statement of current legislation on the issue, the paper analyzes the problem in the following five aspects:(1) the uncertainty of subject of criminal liability;(2) the singularity and malformation of penalties;(3)the consequential offence provision stipulated in criminal law going against to prevent accidents;(4) the lack of compensate standards for dead miners in criminal law causing hard accountability of compensation liability;(5) the inadequacy between criminal law and coal mine safety technology or standard procedure resulting the loss of operability in criminal law.In the third part, the paper studies the coal mine criminal legislations in foreign countries. Especially that the America’s advanced legislation on criminal liability accountability of coal mine accidents affords lessons for our country. Other countries’ experiences and practices are also learnt.In the fourth part, this paper provides suggestions to perfect China’s criminal law in the field of coal mine production safety. For example, ruling that the productive company or unit should be the subject of criminal liability, stimulating behavioral offence provision into relative articles, increasing the sentencing criterion, adding types of penalties and compensation standards rulings, and establishing the legal procedure of criminal liability accountability. |
