The Supreme People's Court ("SPC") has recently distributed the Opinions on Providing Judicial Services and Safeguards for Ecological Protection and High-quality Development in the Yellow River Basin (the "Opinions").
The Opinions encompass 18 articles divided into three parts. The first part deals with guiding thoughts and overall requirements. The second part is about giving play to the role of trial functions. In this regard, detailed requirements in seven aspects, including ensuring the fulfillment of strict liability, contributing to water-sediment regulation, promoting environmental-friendly water consumption, advocating innovation-driven development, conserving cultural resources, ramping up rehabilitation measures, and paying attention to carrying out targeted policies, are laid out. And the third is about establishing the mechanism of judicial services and safeguards for the Yellow River basin. Approaches in aspects of adjudicatory bodies, centralized jurisdiction, judicial collaboration, coordination, diversified dispute resolution, information sharing, public participation, and team building, are outlined. Among others, the Opinions urge adherence to the outlook of strictest rule of law, and call for efforts to crack down upon, in accordance with the law, violations related to environmental pollution, illegal mining, destructive exploitation, illegal felling of trees, deforestation, and illegal fishing of aquatic products, and severely punish delinquency related to environment regulation and crimes involved in major work safety incidents that result in serious environmental pollution, in a bid to build a solid ecological defense in the Yellow River basin.