Highlights of work reports from SPC and SPP

Chimneys at a power plant in Huai'an, East China's Jiangsu province, spew smoke. [Photo/IC]

12. Targeting crimes of damaging environmental resources

SPC: Establishing a judicial mechanism in protecting environmental resources and trying public interest litigation cases according to laws, in an aim to build a beautiful China.

SPP: Carrying out special campaigns to supervise crimes on devastating environmental resources, enhancing the judicial role in protecting the ecological environment.

Interpretation:

Nowadays, some places play down the environmental destruction cases by not reaching out to judicial authorities, not filing a case, or imposing administrative fines instead of criminal punishments, which hampers efforts to rectify behavior that harms environment. It needs judicial authorities to deeply investigate into the environmental destruction cases to find out the criminals behind. The SPC and the SPP have announced plans to crack down the environmental destruction cases, sounding an alarm for the criminals.

13. Few sentences differentiated to similar cases

SPC: Improving three platforms on judicial transparency and a data center. Enhancing the big data analysis and unifying the judge criteria to boost adopting similar sentences on similar cases and deciding the sentence due to criteria.

Interpretation:

Similar cases having different sentences are not rare, which confuse people and also impair the dignity of law. How to fulfill the goal of giving similar sentences to similar cases? The SPC's answer is to enhance the big data analysis and unify the judge criteria to reduce the number of similar cases having different sentences.