Case Study Of Environmental Tort

The Interpretation of the Supreme People’s Court on Several Issues concerning the Application of Law in the Trial of Environmental Tort Liability Disputes,and the Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China have formulated relevant norms for the trial of environmental tort cases,but in practice there are some controversial point.By summarying from the judicial practice of a large number of similar cases,especially typical cases,there are four main points of controversy and their solutions in environmental tort cases: First,the distribution of the burden of proof of causality.In judicial practice,there is a mixed use of the three methods of responsibility allocation.For this,the proof system of "the plaintiff’s preliminary burden of proof" should be confirmed and the standard of "preliminary proof" should be specified;The second is the determination of the amount of damages.The non-standard application of "evaluation type","discretionary type" and "mediation type" leads to the instability of the judgment.In this regard,a dual-track system with the identification type as the main method and the discretionary type as the supplement can be established.Besides,the burden of proof of the amount of the infringed party could be reduced by sharing the appraisal fee in advance;The third is the determination of the liability of the infringement by several people.In the process of responsibility allocation,there are inaccurate application of laws and imperfect internal recovery mechanisms.Therefore,it is a feasible way to strictly identify the types of infringement by several persons,formulate a differentiated evaluation system,and establish a responsibility performance guarantee mechanism;The fourth is the determination of compensation for mental damage.Different from the second point of material damage,the compensation for mental damage focuses on the personal rights and interests endangered by environmental infringement.In practice,there are inconsistencies in the applicable conditions and differences in the definitions of laws and regulations.In response to the above problems,in addition to formulating initial standards for the protection of environmental personality rights and interests to replace the judgment of "serious consequences" of damage,a professional environmental trial system should also be established,such as the improvement of the construction of environmental resources tribunals.