중국 환경공익소송의 원고적격에 관한 연구

Recently, China has made a great progress in economy, but, at the same time, is now paying a heavy price for the destruction of environment. Since the late of 1990s, cases on environmental pollution have become very common in China, giving rise to an upsurge of public environmental litigation. This upsurging trend is not only limited to victims only; we also observe an increasing number of cases filed by the third party individual, social environment protection organizations, the prosecutory authorities and environmental branches of government. The difficulties of public environmental litigation generally lies in filing and enforcement. In order to resolve the difficulty surrounding the enforcement, the court should become independent from local government both in finance and in appointing its personnel. Financial independence is now put on the judicial reform agenda. The difficulty in filing can be mitigated by relaxing the plaintiff standing limitation. Taking the characteristics of “Protection of Public Environmental Interest” and “the constant failure of the governmental sector's environment protection” into consideration, I think that the plaintiff standing should be extended to individuals, social organizations and prosecutory authorities. As for the environmental branches of government, I think, we had better give them administrative enforcement powers than give them plaintiff standing for the public environmental litigations. Thus, we would be able to secure the timeliness, effectiveness and efficiency in governmental environment protection activities.