Ministry of Education recently announced the 8th five-year (2021-2025) plan on improving legal awareness and arranged a comprehensive deployment in this field, including profoundly implementing popularization of applying laws to daily life, law-related lectures for students, and extensive activities on constitution education for national students. From this perspective, we could see that the publicity of legal-awareness has come into everyone’s life.

CBCGDF always features a strong influence on biodiversity protection and green development at home and abroad. In response to the national call, we have carried out a series of work in environmental public interest litigation since 2015.

Steady development of environmental public interest litigation:

The scope and boundaries of environmental public interest litigation cases by CBCGDF have been expanding and have experienced innovation. In addition to traditional environmental pollution (water, gas, soil, etc.) and ecological destruction (rare and endangered wildlife and their habitats, etc.), CBCGDF also tried to file litigations in other types, such as those about cultural relics and climate change, as well as some innovative public interest litigations like non-smoking policy in public areas.

Environmental public interest litigation has played a favorable role in safeguarding public health and environmental rights.

On July 21, the Policy and Law Department of CBCGDF received a paper of civil judgement from Baoding Intermediate People’s Court of Hebei Province that AEON Investment Co. Ltd and 2 other companies were sued by CBCGDF for the misconduct of smoking indoors, which caused environmental damage. This is the first judgement on cases about smoking indoors to require the defendant to pay 1.4 million yuan. CBCGDF always hold the faith that all Chinese indoor public places should follow the requirements of World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC), which means that both smoking in public areas and establishing smoking rooms/zones in the public are strictly prohibited.

Here’s one more successful case accomplished by CBCGDF:

On October 26, 2016, we sued Taobao and a Shenzhen company for illegally producing and selling cheating device of annual inspection of automobile. This case has been regarded as a typical one in environmental public interest litigation by People’s Court of China.
As the endeavors we have exerted become increasingly well-accepted by the public, we will keep trying to facilitate law popularization and put related work in terms of environment protection on the top. We will also spare no pains to clarify responsibilities on each division, make up for the deficiency, conscientiously carry out national standards and practically implement everyday tasks.

Original Chinese article:  https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ELWiGfiEzGfH2sywkiN_aQ

Translator/ Kim  Check/Samantha
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