The Joint And Several Liability Of The EIA Agency Tort

With the economic development of our country, people are paying closer attention to the environment problems than before, so that the problem of the EIA agency tort has become more and more visible. Though the government has issues the new Environment Protect Act and the Judicial Interpretation of Environmental Tort which has made a preliminary provision to joint and several liability of infringement, how to change this situation is still a problem that need to be solved. The nature of EIA agencies, the specific commitment of joint liability and the constitutive elements of tort liability are still blurred in the current academic research. As the subject of EIA activities, EIA agencies are similar to law firms and accounting firms. In our country they are all professional institutions that provide service with higher professional knowledge to gain profit, so from the point of view of legislation and practice, it may be more suitable to set the nature of EIA agencies as the social intermediary organization. In order to response what the tort liability of EIA, the author in terms of the elements of its responsibility and the classification of joint and several liability to incorporates joint liability into the subjective relevance. Also,to answer how to apply the joint and several liability in the judicial practice, the author explores the tort liability of the relevant provisions in EIA from the angle of the interpretation theory, especially focuses on article 65 in the Environment Protect Act and article 16 in the Judicial Interpretation of Environmental Tort, launches a deep probe to the following problems which includes the definition of the behavior such as "fraud", what are contained in the relevant laws and regulations and the meaning or standard of "actual knowledge". After doing this, the paper analyzes constitutive elements of the EIA tort from four aspects of the infringement behavior, damage consequences, causality and fault.Then the author discriminates the basis of application right in EIA, one has finally defined its dual nature as both person rights and property rights instead of the traditional views of environmental right, which is more in conjunction with the provisions of existing laws.Finally, through analyzing reasons of the EIA tort, the author puts forward four suggestions to perfect the joint and several liability of EIA agencies.