From Yale Environment 360:
Down a dark corridor of a university campus in Beijing, a gold plaque on a wall of peeling paint marks the home of the Centre for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims, a small office that is arguably the epicenter of public-interest law in China.
Inside the cramped suite, shelves buckle under the weight of binders stuffed with thousands of hand-written accounts of polluted rivers and contaminated fields across China. Embroidered gold and maroon tapestries adorn the walls, gifts from the villages whose legal cases the center has helped win.
Xu Kezhu is the center’s deputy director and an environmental law professor at the China University of Political Science and Law, where its offices are housed. Unlike most of her academic colleagues, she is interested in the law not only as theory, but in practice. “China has many good environmental laws,” she told me. “The problem is enforcement.”
Read also Environmental Hero: Xu Kezhu from China Environmental Law.
