THE Guangdong Provincial Consumer Council has lodged a public lawsuit, on behalf of consumers, against 20 suspects over allegedly selling substandard pork with Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court last week.

    The council demanded that the court punish the suspects with a fine of 10.06 million yuan (US$1.46 million). The council also want the suspects to make public apologies on provincial media outlets as well as paying the costs of the lawsuit.

    The Shenzhen court has already received the case and will start to hear it. According to legal experts, it will be the first case lodged in the interest of general consumers in Guangdong Province and the country’s first public litigation demand for a court verdict on compensation for consumers.

    In August 2014, police in Longgang District, along with officials from the city’s market supervision bureau, busted 20 suspects for selling substandard pork in Huiyang of Huizhou and the Pinghu area of Shenzhen.

    The suspects allegedly had turned a blind eye to butchers without legal certificates and distributed pork from dead and sick pigs in the Guangdong market, which compromised consumers’ health.

    According to one of the suspects’ interrogation record, he had worked at a slaughterhouse that allowed illegal slaughter of dead and sick pigs from February 2014 to August 2015. He did not report the issue to the authority.

    Another suspect’s record revealed that at least two or three sick pigs were slaughtered at the slaughterhouse each day, meaning a total of at least 100,000 kilos of pork from sick pigs had been sold in the markets.

    The Longgang People’s Procuratorate lodged a lawsuit against the traders in May last year and the case is still undergoing a second trial.

    In November, the Shenzhen Municipal People’s Procuratorate suggested that the provincial council file a public lawsuit against the traders.

    The class lawsuit is a newly introduced judicial practice in China and is only enacted in the fields of environmental protection and consumption rights for the moment.

    After preparing for over three months, the provincial council lodged the class action with Shenzhen People’s Intermediate Court on March 8, one week before the International Day for Protecting Consumers’ Rights.

    Zhu Lieyu, one of the lawyers representing the case, said that most consumers would not file lawsuits against merchants for many reasons, which would undermine the punishment of such traders. Therefore, consumer councils should take responsibility for preserving consumer rights. (Zhang Qian)