On Natural Person to Bring Environmental Public Interest Litigation

With the deepening of reform and opening-up, China's market economy began to transform from extensive economy to intensive economy. However, ecological environment has been destroyed in this period, and people's demand for good public environment grows with each passing day. In this context, the environmental public interest litigation system is formally established by the newly-revised "Civil Procedure Law" as a legal system, which marks a big step forward towards the legal protection of the ecological environment in China. However, the legislative process of environmental protection can't catch up with the ideal demand on the environmental protection, and the plaintiff of environmental public interest litigation in the legislation is confined to relevant organs and organizations, not relating to the natural person. But the natural person is entitled to public interest litigation in both continental law system countries and Anglo American law system countries. Therefore, to perfect the system of the natural person bringing forward the environmental public interest litigation has become one of the important issues of the theory of environmental protection.