Constructing Common Regulations of General Part of China's Environmental Code from the Perspective of Legal Order

Abstract

Order comes first in legal values, while laws should maintain the consistency and stability of order. The proposed China's environmental code (Code) shall restate the prevailing environmental legal norms and optimize the prevailing environmental legal order. From the perspective of stabilizing the legal order, common regulations of General Part of the Code should connect with the constitution and the prevailing environmental laws, determine the legal values of the Code-governing environment, and provide the foundation and basic framework for each subsequent part of the Code. Therefore, common regulations of the Code should recognize and support the constitution order and bolster the emerging eco-environment legal order relating to the eco-civilization construction. They should be coherent, value-orientated, and independent, inheriting the general framework of the prevailing Environmental Protection Law of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and other specific environmental laws, and developing the applicable norms. Specifically, consistently with the legislative purposes, the Code common regulations should recognize the objectives of construction of eco-civilization and pursuit of social, economic and ecological sustainable development, and this pursuit should be carried out based on the basic principles; the application scope of ecological environment should be redefined in order to maintain the ecological value and overall ecological order; the clause on basic environmental obligations and the clause on citizens' environmental rights should be defined with the national environmental protection obligations as the main thread and the multi-player legal relationship as the framework; and the national environmental protection obligations should be preliminarily delivered with three clauses: national environmental protection financial support, environmental publicity and education, and global environmental governance.

Keywords

environmental code / common regulations / legal order / sustainable development

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Higher Education Press