China Environmental Law

The Observer ran an article yesterday which profiled a tort action brought by some injured parties in a “cancer village.” Although the thrust of the piece was that environmental activism, to the extent it exists in China, is being placed in Olympic lockdown mode, the report about the lawsuit itself is relatively encouraging:

The people of Hou Wang Ge Zhung believe that their small community, hidden among fields and birch trees an hour’s drive from Beijing, has joined the ranks of China’s ‘cancer villages’. They blame the chemical factory built in the area five years ago for 25 villagers having had the disease diagnosed and 19 having died since 2002. Like the vast majority of the scores of such communities where ‘cancer clusters’ have been detected, they have little hard evidence to back their claim - which is denied by the factory owners. Nevertheless, they have launched a legal case for compensation, inspired by the success of other communities which have won money from polluters.

Remember that in China under most environmental statutes once the plaintiff establishes an injury and contact with the defendant’s pollutants, the burden shifts to the defendant to prove that its pollutants did not cause the plaintiff’s injuries. This is a significantly more plaintiff-friendly system than in the US.

It appears, however, that

Now, because of the Olympic Games, the villagers of Hou Wang Ge Zhung will have to wait until the autumn for a decision. ‘We have been told nothing will be settled either way until after the Olympics,’ said one villager. ‘Otherwise it could be bad for the image of Beijing and the country.’

From a US-litigation perspective, where cases of this type can take years to resolve, a several month delay would not raise an eyebrow, and even in Hou Wang Ge Zhung  [I have to think there is something wrong with the name of this village, there is no "zhung" in pinyin for one thing] the people seem to be taking it in stride:

‘If it is bad for the image of the city to have a decision on our court case before the Olympics, we will wait,’ said one farmer playing cards in the street. ‘We can’t do anything else. We are just poor villagers.’

The remarkable and encouraging aspect of this story is that the case is still pending in the court system. The local party chief is clearly antagonistic to the plaintiffs.

‘Until the Olympics are over, things have to be regulated. This is the order we have had from the government,’ said Wang Hue, village chairman and local Communist party chief. ‘There is no point in interviewing the villagers. I am their representative and I know they agree with the government. Those who launched the lawsuit are troublemakers.’

With this level of hostility from Chairman Wang (he sounds like a piece of work doesn’t he?), one would have expected the local court to either have refused to accept the filing of the plaintiffs’ case or to have dismissed it by now. Neither has happened and it remains pending subject to a several month delay. That is progress.

While we are talking about torts, there was a note (Chinese only) last week on chinacourt.org that the tort liability law currently in the drafting process (and purportedly set for release during the tenure of the current National People’s Congress) will address at least five areas including clarification of how compensation should be calculated in cases of environmental tort. Although the examples given in the note deal with the need to change aspects of what would be considered the workers’ compensation in the US, presumably the law will also address compensation in pure environmental tort cases.