Environmental and Climate Justice in Palestine

To have a clean, safe, and functional environment is not only essential for the purpose of preservation, but also imperative for safeguarding the most fundamental of human rights. Resolution 45/94 of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly also stresses and acknowledges that: “all individuals are entitled to live in an environment adequate for their health and wellbeing” (United Nations Digital Library System, 1991). Environmental and climate justice, which: “emerged in the context of the local environmental struggles of directly oppressed groups”, is a global movement dedicated to ensuring equal protection of people’s human rights (i.e., water, health, life, etc.) in the face of the climate crisis. Moreover, health, environment and human rights are part of the 2030 agenda (in particular, SDG 1, SDG 5, SDG 6, SDG 7, SDG 13, SDG 16, SDG 17). Individually, both environmental and climate justice are rooted in an intersectional outlook, by which they highlight the common threads between communities and the people’s inclusion, irrespective of race, class, or gender, in the pursuit of justice. On the other hand, they recognise and acknowledge the role and consequences of climate change in economic, social, and political dimensions;thus, drawing emphasis on the rights of people under the emerging inequities. In the case of Palestine, the Palestinian community is increasingly becoming vulnerable to these effects and the resulting inequalities of climate change. This vulnerability stems from: 1) The right to life;clean WASH;equitable work opportunities;access to resources;and free movement;are all examples of human rights that the Israeli colonial regime infringes upon;2) Infrastructure is essential for climate adaptation: 61% of the West Bank is ultimately barred from building infrastructure (B’Tselem, 2019) and Gaza Strip has major gaps in infrastructure due to intentional destruction by Israel;3) Palestinian deprivation of the sovereign right to natural resources by Israel;4) Apartheid system in water accessibility: Israeli water usage per person is over three times higher than that of Palestinians (their usage is under the WHO recommended minimum per day) (B’Tselem, 2023);and 5) Violent settler attacks. In 2022 alone, the Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem (ARIJ) recorded 1527 settler attacks that targeted land, properties, livestock, agriculture and even Palestinian civilians. The ongoing neglect of these concerns and the persistent colonization of Palestine by Israel unequivocally and unwaveringly affect the human rights of Palestinians. The power dynamics at play especially hamper the Palestinian ability to exercise and fulfill their inalienable human rights and to tackle the obstacles to justice in their environment.

Advancement Towards Spatial Justice:The Barrier-Free Environment Construction from a Gender Perspective

Space is both a product and a producer of social relations.In the spatial domain,gender blindness has long existed,limiting women’s rights of access to and use of space,leading to structural oppression of women’s rights,and giving rise to new gender inequalities.The barrier-free environment construction has the functions of eliminating physical barriers and generating societal norms,and when combined with social changes,can facilitate justice correction across multiple dimensions.However,barrier-free environment construction itself,as a means of justice correction,also suffers from gender blindness.There remains room for improvement in the areas of facility construction,information exchange,and social services within the realm of barrier-free environments.In response to this phenomenon,gender equality offers a new critical perspective.Therefore,integrating a gender perspective into the barrier-free environment construction,focusing on the spatial rights of women,especially groups with multiple vulnerabilities,such as disabled women and elderly women,can contribute to the advancement towards spatial justice.

Challenges to Online Criminal Litigation in the Context of Smart Justice and Responses——Focusing on the Protection of the Right to Defense

Online criminal litigation transcends the constraints of physical time and space and changes the logic and path of trial hearings for some criminal cases with the help of technology.However,the leapfrog shift from the“physical field”to the“virtual field”has brought great challenges to the effective exercise of the defendant's right to defense.Online criminal justice further highlights the imbalance in the relationship between prosecution and defense in the context of smart justice,and proposes a new topic for protecting the human rights of the prosecuted.The introduction of online criminal litigation in judicial practice is intended to achieve justice in a faster and more convenient way.However,the dissipation of the ritualized remote hearings tends to undermine the effectiveness of the defense and impair the defense's ability to cross-examine evidence,while the technically advantageous public authorities can aggravate the barrier to the defense's meeting and reading the case file.The root cause is that technological power instrumentalism overemphasizes pragmatism and the pursuit of truth under the position of authority,thus diluting humanistic care for the subject of litigation.In order to resolve the problem with the quality and effectiveness of the right to defense in remote hearings,it is necessary to transform online criminal litigation from a“practical technical tool”to a“convenient auxiliary method,”and appropriately weigh the limits of pursuing truth against human rights protection in special scenarios.Meanwhile,it is also feasible to provide technical care for the defense and strengthen its ability to cross-examine evidence.Moreover,a covert communication platform should be furnished for the defender's online meeting to actively strengthen the protection of the defendant's right to defense.

Crossing the Achilles Heel of Algorithms:Identifying the Developmental Dilemma of Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Judicial Decision-Making

In the developmental dilemma of artificial intelligence(AI)-assisted judicial decision-making,the technical architecture of AI determines its inherent lack of transparency and interpretability,which is challenging to fundamentally improve.This can be considered a true challenge in the realm of AI-assisted judicial decision-making.By examining the court’s acceptance,integration,and trade-offs of AI technology embedded in the judicial field,the exploration of potential conflicts,interactions,and even mutual shaping between the two will not only reshape their conceptual connotations and intellectual boundaries but also strengthen the cognition and re-interpretation of the basic principles and core values of the judicial trial system.

Objects of Criminal Legal Aid--Center On Judicial Justice and Human Rights Protection

The object of criminal legal aid refers to the person in a criminal case who has the right or eligibility toapply for legal assistance and who receives it. According to jurispru- dence, the object （or aid recipient） is a party in a given legal case, who is granted legal aid. They are often among the disadvantaged group in criminal cases, since most of them are mentally challenged, lack free- dom or have health problems.＇ Both international and domestic laws have certain norms regarding objects of criminal legal aid. Our domestic law places more emphasis on ＂defen- dants＂ while downplaying ＂suspects＂ and ＂victims＂ in identifying objects.

Important Guarantee for Judicial Justice——Huang Jin on Improving Judicial Protection for Human Rights

The Decision on Certain Issues on Comprehensively Deepening the Reform, which was endorsed bythe Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China （CPC）, advocates improving judicial protection for human rights, making human rights protection one of the practical measures for implementing the principle of respecting and ensuring human rights, and making improvement of the judicial protection of human rights an important part of comprehensively deepening the reform. Prof. Huang Jin, president of the China University of Political Science and Law, was interviewed by the journal.

Judicial Protection and Restorative Justice of the Support Rights and Interests for the Elderly Rights——Taking the Sample of Judgement Documents from 2013-2018 as Analysis Object

The support rights and interests of the elderly is one of the core issues of an aging society.Judging from the judgment documents on support dispute cases in recent years,maintenance disputes mainly occur in the kinship structure of parents and children,the support obligators are mainly men,the content of support is mainly material appeals.In the judicial process,there are some characteristics worth studying,such as lawyers,intervention,judges,thinking,reasoning and expression.In view of this,the current development direction of the judicial protection of elderly’s rights and interests in China should be carried out around the goal of"restorative justice"and efforts should be made,such concept renewal,system improvement and spiritual support prospect.

Judicial Administration Reform Promotes Human Rights——An interview with Zhang Sujun,Vice-Minister of Justice

Following is a transcript of an interview given to Human Rights by Zhang Sujun, China＇s Vice-Minister of Justice, on how the on-going judicial administration reform promotes the protection of human rights in the country.

An Empirical Assessment and Analysis of the United Nations Convention on Contracts Judicial Applicability in China

Chinese domestic legislation on the judicial applicability of international treaties has been unsettled,especially under the Civil Code,which is silent on this issue.However,previous studies have depicted an image of a“pro-CISG”attitude in Chinese legal practice,which is distinguished from the tendency to circumvent the CISG in other jurisdictions such as the U.S.This contradictory phenomenon,namely the absence of guiding norms versus the embracement of the CISG in judicial practice,is rarely discussed,especially within the context of civil codification and recent external economic challenges.To verify this paradox,a manually collected dataset of 223 court decisions from 2013 to 2023 identifies some basic characteristics of the CISG judicial applicability in China,including the application rate,legal reasoning paths,citation frequencies of specific provisions,and some qualitative observations about the judicial behaviors in the international sales dispute resolution.The main finding is that Chinese courts have been applying the CISG at an obviously higher rate,compared with both their foreign counterparts and the general rate of applying foreign law in the international civil and commercial litigations in China.To explain this gap between“law in book”and“law in action,”the context of Chinese judicial practice should be considered.Despite the vagueness of domestic legislation,the judicial policy promotion,the innovative guiding cases system,the legal transplantation,and other factors may contribute to the“pro-CISG”attitude.As for the future promotion of CISG in the Chinese style of international commercial dispute resolution,these factors may coordinate with the legislative improvements.

Environmental Justice through Community-Policy Participatory Partnerships

Geographical information systems (GIS) are often used to design environmental justice (EJ) policy interventions. Leveraging GIS and other graphics, overburdened EJ communities can learn from maps that geographically link environmental burden (EB) and social disparity (SD) data. Visually representing EB and SD data concretizes the unjust distributions of environmental and broader inequitable societal policies. These maps can be used to efficaciously assess EJ disparities created by such policies through exploring socioeconomic characteristics with local communities. Given the great variation in how GIS EJ applications measure and visualize EB and SD, we present a community-based participatory design (CBPD) lens to collaboratively work across overburdened communities and support making EJ data accessible to all stakeholders. Our location proximity approach is a powerful way to assess overburdened EJ communities because it relies on user-predefined boundaries, and it doesn’t use a single fixed unit of reference to prioritize areas of intervention. Moreover, most areal unit applications use ordinal measures, such as percentiles, and multidimensional indexes, which are intelligible to understand by many residents. Leveraging a community-based participatory design methodology, we present our novel Proximity to Hazards Dashboard (PHD) that includes data on asphalt plants and industrial corridors, hazards often missing from state-level dashboards but very relevant for city policymaking, as well as more traditionally used environmental hazard sources. The use of the tool by policymakers and community members suggests that EJ categorization should focus less on procedural benchmarks and more on systemic change for policy impacts in ways that sustain the participatory nature of our approach.

气候司法本土化的三重逻辑:规范、价值和功能

在全球气候治理司法化转型的背景下,中国司法系统在应对气候变化中呈现出全面积极的态度。气候司法作为环境司法专门化的新领域,亟须形成体系性的本土化方案。气候司法本土化的核心要义在于彰显主体性,需要将气候司法的概念体系、功能定位、审判机制、裁判体系与规则等置于中国法治现代化特定背景和社会结构条件之中予以把握,其内在逻辑是涵括规范体系、价值序列和功能定位的动态体系。当前,中国气候司法规范体系中的多层次立法呈现间接、倡导属性,且多元化司法规范创制不足,体系化任务尚未完成,继而诱导出气候司法规范的周延性困境和融贯性难题。在此情形下,气候司法所保护法益的识别和核心价值尚未被清晰地析出,且科学上的不确定性、政策权衡、经济诱因等诸多外部因素限制着对气候变化案件的价值判断。这些都深刻地影响气候司法作为公益型司法与治理型司法的双重功能定位和发展方向。为此,气候司法本土化的方式与进路需要基于规范、价值和功能三重逻辑及其呈现的问题或要求展开。首先,强化多重规范秩序的塑造,从公私法协同出发推动气候变化立法体系化,通过强化次级气候司法规范凝聚共识,借助多元法律解释方法提升气候司法规范体系的融通性。其次,以利益为核心建构法律论证的权威,通过涉碳利益的衡量强化裁判的实质理由,通过气候环境利益的多维保护强化裁判的开放性,通过外在因素与法律因素的平衡强化裁判的权威理由。最后,精准塑造气候司法的双重功能,以风险预防原则构建预防性公益型气候司法,以政策的司法化构建服务于“双碳”目标的治理型气候司法。

Human Rights in Civil Judicial Documents:Conception and Function

Traditional human rights theory tends to hold that human rights should be aimed at defending public authority and that the legal issue of human rights is a matter of public law.However,the development of human rights concepts and practices is not just confined to this.A textual search shows that the term“human rights”exists widely in China’s civil judicial documents.Among the 3,412 civil judicial documents we researched,the concept of“human rights”penetrates all kinds of disputes in lawsuits,ranging from property rights,contracts,labor,and torts to marital property,which is embedded in both the claims of the parties concerned and the reasoning of judges.Human rights have become the discourse and yardstick for understanding and evaluating social behavior.The widespread use of the term“human rights”in civil judicial documents reflects at least three concepts related to human rights:first,the rights to subsistence and development are the primary basic human rights;second,the judicial protection of human rights is a bottom-line guarantee;third,the protection of human rights aims to achieve equal rights.Today,judges quote the theory of human rights in judicial judgments from time to time,evidencing that human rights have a practical function in judicial adjudication activities,and in practice this is mainly manifested in declaring righteous values and strengthening arguments with the values and ideas related to human rights,using the provisions concerning human rights in the Constitution to interpret the constitutionality,and using the principles of human rights to interpret blurred rules and rank the importance of different rights.

论中国式司法现代化

司法现代化是国家治理现代化的重要组成部分,事关法治文明进步和经济社会发展。中国式司法现代化是中国共产党领导、以人民为中心、以中华司法文明为根脉、以高远法律价值为目标、以能动司法为功能定位、以司法体系建设为主体工程、以司法体制改革为根本路径、以现代科技应用为强大动力、以提升涉外司法能力为紧迫任务的司法现代化。

基于环境正义的城市空间治理研究和实践进展

基于环境正义的城市空间治理研究与实践已成为国内外城市规划、建设和管理的关注热点话题。文章在界定环境正义与城市空间治理概念的前提下,构建基于环境正义的城市空间治理内涵和认知框架,并利用CiteSpace软件分析基于环境正义的城市治理研究的主题特征和变化情况。针对既有的城市环境不公正问题,文章构建了基于环境正义的城市空间治理内涵框架,从认知正义、程序正义与分布正义3个层面分析环境正义问题,并从治理目标和路径两个方面分别讨论城市空间治理如何迈向环境正义,以期为新时期我国开展以公平正义为目标的高水平城市空间治理提供借鉴。

Methodology of Marx for Ecological Justice

Historical materialism provides a methodology for solving the problem of ecological justice,that is,consciously constructing the socialist power system is the prerequisite and foundation for realizing ecological justice.In essence,the fundamental nature of the socialist power system,namely,“affinity to the people”,determines the realistic possibility of ecological justice.

Marx’s Ontology of Social Power System for Ecological Justice

Historical materialism provides the ontology basis to understand the contemporary ecological justice problem,which is the perspective for analyzing ecological interests from the nature,structure,and transition of the social power system.The transcendence of Marx’s thoughts on western mainstream environmental justice theory lies that it does not based on the“speculative ontology”of metaphysics,but on the basis of“realistic ontology”of social power system.

破解海岸带环境司法困境:基于陆海统筹原则

我国海岸带环境案件存在管辖权冲突、法律适用有争议、原告资格不明确、诉讼性质认定有争鸣、诉讼程序衔接未确定、司法执行机制不完善等环环相扣的问题,造成海岸带环境司法困境。究其根源,主要在于陆海“二分法”的分类思维影响较大,其与陆海统筹合为表里的内涵尚未得到全面、深入的理解。为破解海岸带环境司法困境,既要重视海岸带环境案件的特殊性,将其确立为类型化案件并由海事法院专门管辖,又要贯彻陆海统筹原则,实现司法规则内在融贯、法治环节协调一致。

中国式法治现代化的司法推进

实现中国式法治现代化意味着必须推进公正司法,二者间是目标与方法的关系。中国式法治现代化的司法推进是指司法机关在党的领导下,以公正司法和人民司法为价值坚守,通过司法政策、司法制度、司法理念和司法实践的革新,全面作用于立法、执法与守法,最终“四力合一”形成“四驱动力”推动实现中国式法治现代化。其基本特征是:在领导制度上始终坚持党的领导;在指导思想上始终以中国特色社会主义法治理论为引领;在推进方略上实行司法政策、司法制度、司法实践和司法理念的“四维联动”;在价值目标上始终把人民利益放在首位。在中国式法治现代化进程中,司法推进以期改革成本、实践性能和制度供给上的实践优越性,深度契合中国式现代化本质要求的理论适洽性,彰显了中国的司法智慧,演绎了司法文明的新形态。未来的司法推进应始终将“以党为舵”“以民为本”“公正为魂”及“科技为用”融贯司法活动的全过程全领域,谱写法治文明的新篇章。

法律适用统一的路径和方法分析

在成文法体制下,法律适用统一是司法的一项基本理念和原则。该原则的实施关系到成文法体制语境中,司法公正与司法公信力的重要问题。在我国,实现法律适用的统一主要有三种路径:行政性路径、法律性路径以及学理性路径。这三种路径的作用机制和效用各有所不同。尽管行政性路径和方法直接、高效,但基于司法行政化本身的结构性弊端,从今后的发展来看该路径应当调整、限缩;在法律性路径中,救济程序中的上诉审还应当进一步完善和充实,通过设立法律审强化其法律适用的统一;学理性路径和方法是今后应该大力充实和发展的方向,但这一方向面临着学术与司法实践大环境的调整且是一项长期而艰巨的任务。

人工智能辅助司法审判:现实阻滞与法治策略

随着人工智能技术的飞速发展,人工智能系统逐渐被引入司法审判领域,在辅助司法审判应用过程中发挥着“连接桥”“参考书”“预警器”作用。但限于科技发展的渐进性,当前人工智能辅助司法审判的功能发挥仍面临诸多困境,主要表现为人工智能的技术局限化、审判法官的应对失能化以及科技公司的生产机械化等。为破解数字司法的实践难题,首先,应当突破传统技术限制,完善对先进审判系统的宏观设计;其次,应当设置体系化技术培训方案,切实提高应用主体系统操作能力;最后,应当从严把握技术准入标准,规范产品提供行为,为人工智能辅助司法审判的应用提供强有力的保障。