Case 17. Food Proposals to the Two Sessions

Since 2016, CBCGDF has begun to closely follow food and drug safety and discovered that safety issues have appeared frequently. For example, aquatic products in Beijing supermarkets were detected to contain malachite green, and e-commerce platform seafood such as the shuttle crabs had been contaminated with cadmium. CBCGDF believes that social organizations are an important force in maintaining the public interests of society and representing public participation.

Since the establishment of the new environmental public interest litigation system in 2015, CBCGDF has introduced more than 100 environmental public interest litigations in conjunction with the new Environmental Protection Law of the People's Republic of China, which involves air pollution, water pollution, soil pollution, ecological damage and species protection, and other areas to effectively protect the public interest. However, at present, environmental protection organizations cannot supervise the public interest behaviors of the government and enterprises in the field of food and drug safety through public interest litigation.

Social organizations, as supervisors, maintain public interests and have natural advantages to do so. It has two targets of supervision —one is the government, especially the local government; the other is the enterprise. The supervision of the government is extra-institutional. It is the supervision from a third-party perspective and may be more effective than that of the public. In addition, social organizations do not run into the issue of territoriality in public interest litigation. The procuratorial organs carry out public interest litigation accounting for financial costs, but social organizations do not consume financial resources to carry out public interest litigation.

Therefore, CBCGDF will openly advocate, based on the classic case of the “Changchun Longevity Vaccine” incident that drew the the public’s attention in 2018, that the National People's Congress should authorize social organizations to conduct public interest litigation trials in the food and drug field, and clarify the legally existing social organizations as food and drug public welfare.

By / Cathelina