TITLE:
The Legal Conflicts, the Legislative Vacancies and the Legislative Lags in the Chinese Environmental Legal System
AUTHORS:
Yue Zhu
KEYWORDS:
China, The Environmental Legal System, Legal Conflict, Legislative Vacancy, Legislative Lag
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Geoscience and Environment Protection,
Vol.7 No.3,
March
8,
2019
ABSTRACT: The inconsistency and disharmony in China’s environmental legal system are
seriously undermining the authority and effectiveness of environmental laws,
making it hard to achieve the national environmental legislative goals. It is
found in this study that at least 18 administrative regulations and rules conflict
with the five recently-revised environmental laws. The legislative vacancy
rate of province-level environmental laws reaches 27.8%, and that of city-level
environmental laws in the major cities reaches 59.7%. Besides, 66% of the local
including both province-level and city-level environmental laws have the
problem of legislative lags, with an average lag of 2547.8 days. In addition,
there are many legal conflicts between national environmental laws and local
environmental laws. In order to help China to build a harmonious and unified
environmental legal system, some suggestions are proposed in this study,
including comprehensively examining the lower-level environmental laws,
strengthening the leading role of local people’s congresses in environmental
legislation, improving the construction of filing and review mechanism, and
optimizing the mechanisms for information disclosure and public participation.