China experiments with public interest litigations

Beijing: Chinese prosecuting departments had filed 30 public interest lawsuits, mostly related to environmental protection, in courts until the end of June as part of the national pilot programme largely planned on the lines of India's public interest litigations.

"The lawsuits include 11 civil litigation cases, 18 administrative litigation cases and one with both civil and administrative litigation", the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) said yesterday.

China is still experimenting with the PIL concept and has commissioned a national pilot project to test public interest lawsuits aimed at protecting public resources.

Earlier, Chinese law experts visited India to study the working of Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in Indian legal system.

"There were 23 cases for environmental protection-related litigation, accounting for over 76 per cent of the total", state-run Xinhua quoted the SPP as saying.

In July last year, the SPP began a two-year pilot programme that has allowed prosecutors in 13 provincial divisions to initiate public interest litigation cases on environmental protection, preservation of state assets as well as food and drug safety.

PILs mainly refer to lawsuits related to ecology, protection of state-owned assets, transferring state-owned land-use rights and food and drug safety.