Study On The Identification Of "Seriously Pollute The Environment" For The Crime Of Environmental Pollution

The Amendment to the criminal law(viii)replaced "seriously pollute the environment" with "serious consequences of major pollution accidents and major losses of public and private property or human casualties",lowered the threshold for the crime of environmental pollution and expanded the scope of punishment.On December 23,2016,the Supreme People’s Court and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate jointly promulgated Interpretation of several issues concerning the application of law in handling criminal cases of environmental pollution(Judicial interpretation [2016] No.29).This judicial interpretation of "seriously pollute the environment" further clarifies the issue of law application.The amendment of legislation and the introduction of judicial interpretation reflected the transformation of the concept of legislation from single legal interest protection to multiple legal interest protection and from punitive policy to preventive policy in the process of regulating environmental crimes.These changes have created favorable conditions for combating environmental crimes and promoting ecological civilization.However,as the standard for judging "Seriously pollute the environment",the release of Judicial interpretation [2016] No.29 has caused some controversy in the theoretical and practical circles since its introduction.Through the analysis of the two typical cases of environmental pollution crimes and the content of the first trial judgment of 1664 environmental pollution crimes in 2017,this paper finds that the identification standard of "Seriously pollute the environment" proposed by Judicial interpretation [2016] No.29 has theoretical and practical application problems such as diverse forms of crimes,unclear forms of crimes,and fuzzy core legal interests.There are three reasons for the controversy over the specific regulations on "severely pollute the environment" in Judicial interpretation [2016] No.29.One is because of the objective changes in the semantic meaning of the word;The second is that the judicial interpretation does not keep pace with the amended legislation,that is,the judicial interpretation does not fully catch up with the concept change of criminal legislation,resulting in a lot of academic and theoretical contradictions;Finally,the effect of this interpretation on defining the constitutive criteria for pollution of the environment is also controversial.The standard of "severely pollute the environment" should be judged mainly from the legal interests,criminal patterns and criminal forms of the crime of polluting environment.We should insist on protecting unitary environmental law interests while penetrating the thought of preventive governance,adopt the standards of conduct,change the result standard into the result aggravation offence,and remove the blocking standard.Environmental pollution crime is behavioral offence and potential damage offence."severely pollute the environment" can be understood as " environment suffered serious pollution ",can also be understood as a "very serious pollution to the environment behavior",the former is dangerous for environmental pollution behavior state the extent of the sex description,the latter is the limitation on the environmental pollution crime itself.Finally,the subjective form of environmental crime should be intentional behavior.