Green, white papers lead to favorable legal environment

The People’s Procuratorate on Nansha Area of China (Guangdong Pilot Free Trade Zone) recently held a press conference to celebrate its second anniversary and to release both a green paper and a white paper, which review previous work and guide the future.

The papers explain new characteristics and trends in local public interest litigation cases and private enterprises-related cases, based on an analysis of data from the last couple of years. Fourteen typical cases were put forward as demonstrations, paving the way for feasible plans for the future.

The white paper (full-title The White Paper on Services that Ensure Private Enterprises Development) highlights five salient kinds of cases: criminal and civil cross cases, infringement upon intellectual property (IP), labor disputes, interpretation and performance of commercial contracts, and foreign-related IP businesses.

Nansha is home to many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). They have less experience in internal control and supervision when they are starting up. In response, the procuratorate is making changes in four areas in order to foster a fair, transparent and legal business environment.

The measures include a “reprieve prosecution plus social service notification” mechanism and an “enterprise criminal compliance risk prevention and control” mechanism. These are relatively lenient towards enterprises which plead guilty, in order to improve SMEs’ sense of security.

The green paper (The Green Paper on Public Interest Litigation Work) focuses on core sectors of public welfare, such as the environment, food and drug safety, state property and marine conservation.

Notably, faced with the challenge of an ecological appraisal of illegal fishing, the procuratorate is cooperating with the Guangdong Environmental Protection Foundation and the Guangdong Environmental Protection Committee for People’s Mediation to carry out investigations, mediation and supporting indictment works.

They broke a bottleneck in the obtainment of investigation clues and evidence by using a smart public welfare system, blockchain legal attestation platform and unmanned aerial vehicle.