The Supreme People's Court (SPC) released a group of guiding cases on environmental public interest litigation at its first press conference of 2023 on Jan 11. Yang Linping, vice-president of the SPC, Liu Zhumei, presiding judge of the SPC's Environment Resources Division, and Duan Nonggen, director of the SPC's Research Office, attended the conference.

According to Yang, the SPC has guided courts at all levels to firmly implement the legal system of public litigation and fully tap their preventative and restorative role to protect the ecological environment, and has heard a series of signature cases that have domestic and global impact.

Since the implementation of the environmental public litigation legal system ten years ago, courts in China have striven to reform the environmental judicial system, and established 2,426 specialized agencies or organizations for environmental resource trials, making China the only country in the world to have established an environmental resource trial system covering all levels of courts. An all-round public interest litigation protection system, covering air, water, soil, ocean, forest, endangered animals and plants, cultural relics, nature reserves and rural areas, has been established.

Efforts were also made to improve the judgment rules for public interest litigation. Twenty-one judicial interpretations on areas such as environmental civil public interest litigation, ecological and environmental damage compensation, ecological and environmental infringement injunctions, and punitive compensation, as well as 15 judicial policy documents, including opinions on punishing the crime of stealing mineral resources, have been issued.

Courts have continued to strengthen judicial coordination to serve the governance of key river basins. Liu pointed out that the people's courts have issued seven special judicial policy documents to support green development in the Yangtze River Basin and high-quality development in the Yellow River Basin. The courts along the rivers were encouraged to explore diversified cross-administrative centralized jurisdiction models and carry out ecological judicial restoration according to local conditions.

The ten guiding cases released at the press conference involve different types of environmental pollution and ecological damage such as smuggling "foreign garbage", destroying natural relics, stealthily discharging ship sewage, illegal mining, and damaging public forest land, where a diversity of rules, such as infringement by multiple persons, identification of the consequences of ecological and environmental damage, responsibility and acceptance criteria for restoration, technological modification deduction, emergency treatment measures and cost bearing, are applied. A number of procedural regulations, such as pre-litigation consultation, judicial confirmation and advance execution, are also implemented. They are of rule-setting significance for enriching and improving the application of environmental public interest litigation laws.

The cases were selected from courts nationwide after case-by-case studies, multiple rounds of argumentation, and discussion meetings, according to Duan, who said the meeting participants included special advisers invited by the SPC, senior officials from the Supreme People's Procuratorate and the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, and experts and scholars, as well as judges from relevant judicial departments of the SPC and local courts.