China supreme court appoints top environmental judge

China's supreme court has appointed a senior judge to handle environmental cases as the environmentally challenged country bids to get tough on polluters and improve the way its laws are enforced, an official newspaper said on Monday. China Environmental News, published by the Ministry of Environmental Protection, said Deng Xuelin had been appointed as the presiding judge of the Environmental and Resources Tribunal of the Supreme People's Court. Beijing, hit by a series of pollution scares and scandals, has vowed to reverse some of the damage done by three decades of untrammeled economic growth, but it has traditionally struggled to impose its will on big industrial enterprises and the local governments that protect them. The report said the new state tribunal would give "unified guidance and coordination" to the 134 specialist environmental courts that have been set up by local governments, noting that the procedures used to handle such cases was "very informal".

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