Abstract:

 The Chinese government has made significant progress in disclosing environmental information. However, there’s still much more space for improvements. For example, the government agencies often refuse to disclose environmental information under the excuse of “state secrets”; or they tend to conduct stringent censor based on “special needs for production, living or scientific research” upon public’s requests to disclose environmental information. To improve the public right to access environmental information, we should take into consideration both social stability and government capacity to disclose environmental information. In term of practicality, in order to balance the relationship between government authority to manage the environmental information, government capacity to disclose environmental information, and public right to access environmental information, we recommend: 1) to make amendments to the government information disclosure laws and regulations to require that “the government environmental information that should be disclosed voluntarily without requests should not be classified as “state secrets”; 2) to consider stipulating that social entities meeting required legal criteria can apply for disclosing environmental information with no reason (consulting the practice in environmental public interest litigation); and 3) to encourage “disclosure of nongovernmental environmental information” and promote public education on environmental sciences.

Key words: environmental information;management of environmental information, disclosure of nongovernmental environmental information, disclosure of government environmental information,  right to environmental information