Empirical analysis and legislative review on the crime of illegal occupation of grasslands

The Interpretation of the Supreme People’s Court on Several Issues Concerning the Application of Law in the Trial of Criminal Cases of Destroying Grassland Resources was issued in 2012, providing specific legal guidance for the criminal punishment of illegal occupation of grasslands. This study used empirical analysis to examine the judicial status of the types of behaviors, adjudication results, sentencing factors, mitigating circumstances, and other judicial statuses of the crime of illegally occupying grasslands. The results show that the crime of illegally occupying grassland has the problems of unbalanced types of criminal behavior, ambiguous identification of the crime elements, and more arbitrary adjudication and sentencing. The study concluded that this is due to four aspects: insufficient attention to grassland ecological legal interests at the legislative level, lack of clarity in the elements of the crime, lack of differentiation in the grade of penalties, and overly traditional means of penalties. Therefore, the study proposes relevant legislative recommendations: to set up independent crimes, to standardize conviction criteria and clarify the connotation of “substantial destruction”, to refine the legal penalty levels, and to set up diversified penal means.