关键词: 专家意见, 检察公益诉讼, 环境公益诉讼, 专家辅助人

Abstract: As a new type of evidence stipulated in the Rules for the Handling of Public Interest Litigation Cases by People’s Procuratorates, the use of expert opinions helps address the difficulties in proving specialized issues in environmental prosecutorial public interest litigation, and can effectively overcome the limitations of judicial cognition and compensate for the lack of professional knowledge in judicial personnel. Empirical analysis shows that the use of expert opinions in environmental prosecutorial public interest litigation has problems such as inconsistent presentation forms of expert opinions, prominent combined use with appraisal opinions, differences in the identities, types, and sources of experts, and low rate of expert appearance in court for cross-examination. To regulate the use of expert opinions and improve their probative power, regulation should be improved from the following aspects: clarifying the relationship between expert opinions and expert assistants’ opinions, defining the order of application between expert opinions and appraisal opinions, unifying the criteria for expert selection, and improving the safeguard mechanisms for expert appearance and cross-examination in court, so as to better serve the practice of prosecutorial public interest litigation.

Key words: expert opinion, prosecutorial public interest litigation, environmental public interest litigation, expert assistant