To mark the one year anniversary of the enactment of the Wetlands Protection Law on June 1, as well as to showcase results achieved by the people's courts in this regard, the Supreme People's Court (SPC) released 12 typical cases on wetland protection on May 31.

Wetlands are an important natural ecosystem and a key foundation for safeguarding national ecological security. The central authorities have attached great importance to the protection and conservation of wetlands since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, and have made a series of strategic deployments.

On December 24, 2021, the 32nd session of the Standing Committee of the 13th National People's Congress adopted the Wetlands Protection Law, which came into effect on June 1, 2022. It was the first legislation in China specifically aimed at protecting wetland ecosystems, and also a landmark piece of legislation for China's law-based governance on wetland protection, which provides strong legal guarantees for the judicial protection of wetlands.

In recent years, the people's courts have striven to implement the law and properly handle various kinds of wetland-related environmental resources cases, including environmental pollution prevention and control, ecological restoration, and resource development and utilization, which has promoted high-quality wetland protection in the country.

The 12 cases range from criminal, civil, and administrative to public interest lawsuits, involving such areas as the protection of precious and endangered wildlife and plant species, the prevention and control of invasive species, and the protection of major rivers, lakes and wetlands. The protected wetlands concerned in the cases are major wetlands of national and even global importance, and nurture dozens of rare and endangered wild animal species, including Siberian cranes, Milu deer and Chinese white dolphins, as well as countless rare and endangered plant species.

The proper handling of the 12 cases demonstrates the efforts of the people's courts to preserve these beautiful wetlands for future generations, serves as models on further strengthening the judicial protection of wetlands, and is a concrete action in China's fulfillment of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands.