Chinese procuratorial departments have taken systematic approaches to promote the building of a large vision concerning the ecological environment and natural resource protection, according to Ying Yong, Prosecutor General of the Supreme People's Procuratorate and China's Chief Grand Prosecutor.
Ying Yong made those remarks in a special report on litigation pertaining to the ecological environment and natural resource protection given at the sixth session of the Standing Committee of the 14th National People's Congress (NPC) in Beijing on October 21.
Noting that it is a systematic project to promote the building of ecological civilization, Ying said that procuratorial departments at all levels across the country have adopted holistic approaches to ecological conservation.
Since 2018, the committees of Communist Party of China (CPC) and the people's governments of 27 provincial-level regions have introduced specific guidelines on supporting public-interest litigation. Meanwhile, the standing committees of the people's congresses of 29 provincial-level regions have passed special resolutions on procuratorial public-interest litigation related to the ecological environment and natural resource conservation.
Procuratorial departments have strengthened their coordination and interaction with law-enforcement and other judicial organs in the handling of ecological environment and resource conservation litigation cases.
For instance, the SPP has worked with the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, the Ministry of Natural Resources, and other central authorities to further step up their collaboration in procuratorial public-interest litigation.
The SPP, the Ministry of Water Resources and the National Forestry and Grassland Administration have jointly built a collaborative mechanism for administrative law-enforcement and procuratorial public-interest litigation to promote the protection and management of water, forestry, grassland, wetland and desert resources. The SPP has worked with the Ministry in implementing the mechinism of appraising public-interest litigation cases before charging fees involving 58 appraisal institutions.
Meanwhile, 14 provincial-level regions have set up a compensation connectivity mechanism for procuratorial public-interest litigation involving the ecological environment to better cover the losses brought by damage to the ecological environment.
The report said that the SPP has further optimized duty-fulfillment mechanisms for procuratorial departments, reinforced the legal oversight between procuratorial organs at different levels, bolstered cross-departmental coordination and collaboration, lodged civil and public-interest litigation in the process of handling criminal cases, and held those accountable for harm to the environment.
Additionally, procuratorial departments have also improved cross-region collaboration mechanism, coordinated their efforts in discovering evidence, handling and transferring litigation cases, and conducting simultaneous supervision, and have also solved cross-regional and cross-river ecological environment and resource conservation issues and guided the public to take part in environmental governance in a systematic manner.
With the support of the United Front Work Department of the CPC Central Committee and the central committees of eight non-Communist political parties, the SPP has pushed for the building of an online volunteer platform to promote the participation of the public in discovering and addressing issues harmful to the public interest.
