Compensation-featured Group Action:about Its Problems Of System And Practice

In recent years, with the globalization of large-scale production and consumption, group disputes, in which the same kind of behaviors cause damages to the interests of a group of people, have increased day by day. It has been a worldwide issue of how to provide the numerous victims with judicial relief, and many countries have built group action systems. Among the various ways of relief that the group action systems develop, the compensation-featured group action systems have been paid more and more attention, because of the apparent effect of compensating the damaged parties and on compelling the party who caused damages to obey the law. However, as group actions are involved with numerous people and complicated interests, the implementation of compensation-featured group action systems are confronted with more and more difficulties and challenges. On the basis of the comparative study on the theory and practice of the compensation-featured group action systems in each country, and by considering the characteristics of China’s institution, it was put forward in the paper some preliminary suggestions about building a reasonable compensation-featured group action systems in China.The paper is divided into four chapters. The first chapter is about the basic theory about group action. The concept and classification of the group disputes were illustrated, on the basis of which, the definition and characteristics of group action and the definition and types of compensation-featured group action were illustrated.The second chapter is about the difficulties and current implementation of compensation-featured group action systems. Firstly, the unique difficulties of implementing compensation-featured group actions were analyzed and discussed; secondly, the current situations of the implementation of the main compensation-featured group actions in the world were summed up and analyzed horizontally, in the hope of inspiring China’s institutional construction by borrowing the experience from other countries.The third chapter is about the assessment and distribution of damages that are involved in compensation-featured group actions. The focus of this chapter was put on the technical problems in compensation-featured group actions. Three ways of assessment were summed up in the chapter, that is, individual assessment, aggregate assessment and nominal damages; it was also introduced in the chapter that the distribution of damages consists of direct distribution and indirect distribution.The fourth chapter is about the current situation of China’s compensation-featured group action system and the reconstruction of the system. China’s current legislation, judicial policy and judicial practice were summarized; and the existing problems were analyzed in a brief way. Based on the analysis of the first three chapters, suggestions about the reconstruction of China’s compensation-featured group system were put forward, which included perfecting opt-in representative action, detailing regulations on public interest litigation system and adding opt-out class action.