Since 2017, Hunan Province has closely focused on major deployments such as the National Air, Water, and Soil Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan and Hunan Province's strategic goal of building an“ecologically strong province”. With the “One Lake and Four Waters” governance and the “Changsha, Zhuzhou and Xiangtan” air pollution joint prevention and control as the starting point, accurate and accurate policies are implemented. Strictly crack down on environmental violations, increase the efficiency of law enforcement, and achieve remarkable results in environmental law enforcement. After the study, the environmental supervision and law enforcement work in Hunan Province has been successfully reported. The typical practices of Hunan's environmental supervision and law enforcement mainly include the following five aspects: 

• Clear mind, highlight the position of law enforcement

Hunan Provincial Party Committee and Provincial Government attach great importance to environmental supervision and law enforcement work, and continuously strengthen the local government's responsibility for land supervision and law enforcement. The provincial party committee and government leaders have made important instructions on environmental supervision and law enforcement work on many occasions and personally deployed key tasks. In early 2017, Hunan Provincial Environmental Protection Working Conference clearly listed environmental supervision and law enforcement as one of the top five priorities in the year. And require the province's environmental protection departments at all levels to continue to increase efforts to crack down on environmental violations, and the implementation of the law enforcement work as the provincial Environmental Protection Agency to assess the city (prefecture) Environmental Protection Bureau chief of the important content.

• Using force to promote the effectiveness of law enforcement

Paying great attention to reports from the masses, complaints from letters and visits, information released by volunteers, and routine supervision, on-line monitoring, and supervisory monitoring by the environmental protection department, discovering doubtful points, digging the source, resolutely investigating environmental violations, and promptly responding to public concerns. Taking the Central Environmental Protection Inspector as an opportunity, the relevant government departments at all levels have formed a concerted effort to consolidate the situation and have discovered the outstanding environmental issues. They are tying their bills and following the principle of “don't investigate, not rectify, and not rectify”and grasp it in the end. During the inspection, a total of 4025 corporate rectification orders were ordered, and 1223 cases were filed. In the Dongting Lake area and the Chang-Zhu-Tan area, the “Swords of the Lakes” and the “Blue Sky” were organized to strengthen the effectiveness of law enforcement. A total of more than 2,000 companies were investigated, and 370 enterprises suspected of environmental violations were found to have fined 12.76 million yuan.

• High-pressure supervision highlights law enforcement prestige

Pursuant to the principle of "problem to investigate, punishment for punishment, and punishment to be exhausted and move to the fullest extent", Hunan Province investigated and dealt with illegal environmental violations in accordance with the law using various means such as daily penalties, seizure and detention, suspension of production and production, administrative detention, and judicial transfer. We severely punished a number of major environmental violations, concentrated on punishing a number of malicious environmental violations, and focused on addressing a number of prominent environmental issues that the people have strongly reflected. In 2017, a total of 4,726 cases of environmental violations were investigated and prosecuted in the province and a fine of 1.9124 trillion yuan, which was 1.96 times and 2.4 times the number of cases and fines in 2016, respectively. Among them, 50 cases were punished daily, fined 110.28337 million yuan, 490 cases of seizure and detention, and 236 cases of restricted production and production suspension.

• Strengthen Security and Improve the Quality of Law Enforcement Officers

In July 2017, the People's Government of Hunan Province issued the "Circular on Including the Province's Environmental Protection Law Enforcement Agencies into the Government's Administrative Law Enforcement Agencies", becoming the first province in the country to include environmental protection law enforcement agencies in the government's administrative agencies. In July 2017,The People's Government of Hunan Province issued a one-year prior completion of the Provincial Environmental Supervision Bureau, 14 city(state) detachments, and 122 county (city, district) teams, covering a total of 137 environmental monitoring agencies' three-tier mobile law enforcement systems, fully implementing law enforcement informationization. Continued to conduct in-depth law enforcement training, highlighting practical cases, on-site law enforcement techniques, and so on. Since 2015, 30 law enforcement trainings have been conducted, and more than 4,400 people have been trained, effectively improving the overall quality and professional capabilities of law enforcement personnel.

• Judicial linkages and strengthening of law enforcement

In May 2017, the Procuratorate Liaison Office of the Hunan Province Procuratorate was formally established in the Procuratorate and Liaison Office of the Provincial Environmental Protection Agency and became the first provincial-level procuratorate and environmental protection agency liaison agency in the country. All 14 cities (prefectures) of the province have subsequently established corresponding agencies to establish and improve the working mechanisms for the application of laws, clue notifications, case transfer, resource sharing, and information release for suspected environmental crime cases. In 2017, the province transferred 562 administrative detention cases, transferred 73 environmental pollution cases, the number of administrative detention cases exceeded the sum of 2015 and 2016, and the number of environmental pollution crime cases increased by 40% compared with 2016.

It is hoped that the environmental protection departments at all levels in Hunan Province will continue to work hard to maintain the high pressure of severely cracking down on environmental violations, and to promote continuous improvement of environmental quality through strict law enforcement. Environmental protection agencies throughout the country must fully learn from the advanced experience of Hunan Province, continue to improve environmental supervision and enforcement mechanisms and capacity building, increase penalties for environmental violations, and make positive contributions to improving the quality of the environment.

Ministry of Environmental Protection General Office