[**Jiangsu Provincial Procuratorate News].
Sun Ya, Chief Procurator of Chongchuan District Procuratorate, Nantong City, Jiangsu Province.
Recently, I received a ** from the prosecutor of the Baojing County Procuratorate of Hunan Province - Jia and others endangering precious and endangered wild animals The ecological compensation off-site restoration plan was recognized by the local forestry department, and the forestry department will entrust a qualified garden company to open up the ecological restoration forest, and the restoration work will be supervised by the Baojing County Procuratorate throughout the process. The fate of the thrush has finally taken a turn.
In 2022, a merchant in a flower and bird market in Nantong openly sold a second-class key protected wild animal, thrush, and the public security organs found out that the "source" came from Jia, a native of Baojing, Hunan. After investigation, Jia caught and purchased a total of more than 1,200 thrushes from Fu and other hunters, and sold them to more than 20 provinces and cities across the country through the express delivery sites operated by Li, and the thrushes involved in the case were worth more than 6 million yuan.
I presided over the case and set up a team to handle the case. "There are a lot of thrushes in my hometown, and everyone goes up to the mountains to catch them. When he heard that he might face a ten-year sentence, Jia was shocked. His defense lawyer argued that although the thrush was listed as a national second-class protected animal in February 2021, this bird is very common in Jia's hometown, and its behavior has no substantial damage to the reproduction and ecological environment of the local thrush.
Is the defense of Jia and his lawyer valid?In March 2023, the case handling team went to Baojing, Hunan Province to visit and investigate. At the local forestry department, we learned about the distribution of thrush populations and conservation promotion policiesIn Jia's house and nearby villages, we saw that in order to prevent birds from spoiling the crops, many bird nets were set up in the farmland on the mountainInterviewing bird experts, we learned that large hunting can not only harm thrush populations, but also affect the functioning of entire ecosystems.
We believe that it is necessary not only to allow lawbreakers to be punished by law, but also to set up a reasonable "buffer period" for local people to know and abide by the law. We reviewed and determined that the hunters such as Jia and Fu had voluntarily surrendered, the transporter Li was an accomplice, and the purchasers such as Liang did not cause the death of wild animals, pleaded guilty and repented and took the initiative to pay the ecological restoration fund, all of which could be mitigated. For the other more than 20 criminal suspects who bought thrushes only for entertainment, we made a relative decision not to prosecute in accordance with the law, and asked them to publicly apologize at the national level. In the course of handling the case, we simultaneously carried out pre-litigation settlement of public interest litigation, signed public interest compensation agreements with all persons involved in the case, and collected all the compensation in place.
May 22 is the International Day for Biological Diversity, and millions of netizens have observed the case in court, and I applied for experts to come to court to explain the ecological, scientific, cultural and social value of the thrush, and issued a procuratorial declaration of "awakening the awareness of the whole society on the protection of biodiversity" in court. It is believed that under the care of the judicial organs, the thrush will eventually return to the mountains and forests to sing gracefully.
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