NPC taking aim at polluting companies
Legislature urges lawmakers, judges to review rules, strictly punish violators
China’s top legislature ordered local lawmakers and judicial authorities on Monday to combat air pollution by strengthening the rule of law and urging them to make or revise related regulations and implementing strict punishment against polluters.
The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, the top national legislative body, convened a two-day special session on Monday to review its enforcement inspection report on the Air Pollution Control Law and draft a decision on boosting the comprehensive protection of the environment.
“Every provincial-level people’s congress should release or amend regulations on the air pollution prevention law by the end of this year in line with pollution conditions in their areas,” said Li Zhanshu, chairman of the NPC Standing Committee.
He also ordered courts, procuratorates, public security bureaus and justice authorities to cooperate with environmental and ecological departments to improve judicial force against polluters, such as studying evidence collection and clarifying pollution liabilities.
Between May and June, 32 NPC deputies and the legislature’s officials, led by Li, were divided into four teams and visited eight provinces, including Henan, Hebei and Shanxi, to conduct inspections.
It aims to promote implementation of the major decisions and plans of the Communist Party of China Central Committee on environmental protection and pollution control. It will ensure comprehensive, effective law enforcement, solve prominent environmental problems of public concern and strengthen legal protection for making the skies blue again.
“What we did was to strengthen our legal inspection, using the law as a weapon to fight pollution and taking the rule of law as the force to protect blue skies,” Li added.
The legal inspection is a major way the legislature plays its supervision role. It is to figure out problems that affects a law’s enforcement and push related departments to solve them by the rule of law, according to a statement from the legislature.
In this inspection, the teams exposed six major problems in enforcing the law, including irrational industrial structure, insufficient regulations to support the law, faked pollution data and a lack of supervision.
For example, the law asks the State Council to make a rule on how to issue and provide emission permits, but it has not been issued so far, Li said, calling the government to release it by the end of 2019.
It also found that although 274 cities have been given the legislation’s power, only 14 made regulations to support the law, he said.
In addition, six State-controlled data monitoring sites were interfered with intentionally more than 100 times in the year ending in April, the report said.
That the country’s top legislature convened a special meeting on Monday and Tuesday to discuss a report on the results of its inspections to determine how effectively the Air Pollution Prevention and Control Law is being implemented, and a draft decision on further ways to strengthen protection of the environment in accordance with the law, speaks volumes about the importance the country’s top authorities attach to the issue.
The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress sent four teams to eight provincial-level regions — the Inner Mongolia autonomous region and Henan, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Shandong, Hebei, Anhui and Jiangsu provinces — from May to June to check how effectively the law to curb air pollution is being implemented.
The teams spoke with local governments and relevant departments, and conducted on-the-spot inspections of 107 enterprises. Local people’s congresses were entrusted with similar inspections in 23 provincial-level regions.
The results of the inspections are encouraging as they found that overall the situation is improving, with the most recent amendments to the law emphasizing more decentralized emissions governance and mechanisms for controlling the sources of air pollution, producing a marked reduction in air pollution nationwide, with the average concentrations of both PM10 and PM2.5 declining significantly from the levels in 2013.
The amendments to the Air Pollution Prevention and Control Law that became effective on Jan 1, 2016, have established a legal foundation for improving air quality by transferring the responsibility for regulating air pollutants to local governments, which have to tackle pollution at source by forcing enterprises that fail to meet the nation’s environmental protection standards to rectify the problems or else shut down.
In 2017 alone, there were nearly 40,000 cases involving environmental pollution, and 30 percent of them involved air pollution, showing the law is an effective weapon in the intensifying fight against pollution.
The inspections by the NPC aim to ensure that the weapon of the law is being wielded and used to carry out the decisions and plans of the CPC Central Committee, which has identified preventing and controlling pollution as one of three “tough battles” the country must win, along with forestalling major risks and carrying out targeted poverty alleviation.
In this way, the NPC is exerting more pressure on localities to wage war against polluters, and playing its role in guaranteeing people will be able to enjoy a green homeland and blue skies.