Shanghai: China's courts will widen the range of offences that constitute "environmental crimes" to make it easier to take legal action against polluters, a senior judiciary official said yesterday.
The new rules could allow prosecutors to take on persistent offenders in northern China's Hebei province, which was engulfed in heavy smog last week despite being on the front line of China's nearly three-year "war on pollution".
Yan Maokun, head of a research office at the Supreme People's Court, said authorities had struggled to gather evidence required to prosecute, according to a transcript of a briefing published on China's official court website (http://www.chinacourt.org).
"Air pollution is different from water pollution or soil pollution, and it is extremely difficult to get evidence for air pollution crimes because after the pollution is emitted it undergoes a large degree of dispersal, and is very quickly diluted," Yan said.
Prosecutors would focus on specific offences such as tampering with sensor equipment or providing false emissions data, and firms found guilty would be punished regardless of the amount of pollution involved, he said.
"It doesn't matter how much you emit because in fact that is very hard to detect, but if you have distorted or fabricated data or interfered with the operation of equipment, this ... will constitute an environmental crime," Yan said.
Public anger is mounting in China about pollution, and what many see as government talk, but little action, to end it. Worry about pollution has on occasion sparked protests.
Eight cities in Hebei launched "red alerts" last week in response to the smog, which reached record levels at some monitoring stations.
Hebei came under fire from the Ministry of Environmental Protection, and a number of its steel firms were singled out for failing to suspend operations. It has declared 2017 a "year of transformation and upgrading".
