Study On The Protection Of Environmental Tort Claims In Enterprise Bankruptcy Cases

Since the reform and opening up,the industrialization scale of our country has experienced the rare rapid development of the world,and at the same time,a series of environmental problems have gradually emerged,such as water pollution,soil pollution,air pollution and so on.According to China’s current tort liability law,environmental protection law and other relevant laws and regulations,enterprises that cause environmental damage in the process of production and operation and infringe upon the person or property of others shall bear corresponding responsibilities.However,environmental infringement cases generally involve a large area and a wide audience,resulting in a huge amount of compensation for environmental tort liability.Many environmental infringement enterprises are unable to make comprehensive compensation for the infringed.Moreover,environmental infringement is often characterized by the complexity of causal relationship,the persistence of the infringement,and the latent nature of the infringement results.The results of an environmental infringement may not be exposed until several years later.Throughout China’s current environmental protection law,tort liability law and bankruptcy law and other relevant laws and regulations,there are no clear provisions on how to deal with the environmental infringement claims involved in the bankruptcy of enterprises,which gives many enterprises involved in environmental infringement cases to escape legal liability with certain loopholes.Judicial practice,once the enterprise unbearable environment infringement cases occurs,often through bankruptcy and achieve the goal of "default",as ordinary creditor’s rights debt huge environmental infringement,to accept the final sequence of liquidation,the result is often not the rest of the property shall be assigned,and after the completion of the enterprise bankruptcy liquidation,the enterprise main body qualifications,environmental tort creditors plunged into "recourse for" position.Environment infringement enterprise "" of a broken,but the fact of environmental infringement has occurred,the ecological environment has been destroyed,loss of injured party has become a foregone conclusion,the state and society can’t let again,the final outcome is only the state and society serves as a " beautiful " to do a lot of environmental restoration and compensation,and the true " culprits " environment tort enterprise " impunity ".Therefore,it is urgent for China to introduce relevant laws and regulations to fill the gap in legislation and provide strong legal protection for environmental tort creditors in a disadvantaged position.The author tried to explore outside the basis of advanced legislative experience of developed countries,combined with China’s national conditions,from the following two aspects to explore how to effectively protect environment infringement claims in bankruptcy case: the first is in the enterprise bankruptcy case of environmental infringement of creditor’s rights shall hold what kind of attitude,whether its priority shall give priority to the ordinary contract of creditor’s rights;Secondly,the environmental tort consequences will appear only after the bankruptcy liquidation of the enterprise.Since the enterprise personality as legal person has been eliminated,whether "people" should still bear the environmental tort liability,and if so,which subjects should bear it.As for the two problems mentioned above,the author thinks that: as for the first problem,it is necessary to establish the priority of environmental tort claims over ordinary contract claims in enterprise bankruptcy cases.As for the second question,a system should be established to retain the liability subjects of environmental claims and other subjects’ joint and several liability after enterprise bankruptcy liquidation.