The reason for such a drastic revision of normative documents that are not old in themselves is obvious: before this, the newly revised "Administrative Punishment Law" was formally implemented, and new legislative progress has been made in many aspects such as no administrative punishment, lighter punishment and heavier punishment. Just a few months ago, The General Office of the State Council also issued the Opinions on Further standardizing the formulation and Management of the benchmark of Administrative Discretion, which put forward new requirements for the formulation and management of the benchmark of administrative penalty discretion.

The reason for such a drastic revision of normative documents that are not old in themselves is obvious: before this, the newly revised "Administrative Punishment Law" was formally implemented, and new legislative progress has been made in many aspects such as no administrative punishment, lighter punishment and heavier punishment. Just a few months ago, The General Office of the State Council also issued the Opinions on Further standardizing the formulation and Management of the benchmark of Administrative Discretion, which put forward new requirements for the formulation and management of the benchmark of administrative penalty discretion.

The State Administration for Market Regulation's response to and cooperation with legislation and reform is not only reflected in this, the newly revised guidance was issued on the same day, the State Administration also issued the Interim Measures for the Quality and Safety Supervision and Administration of Food-related products that will be implemented in March next year, which explicitly states that producers and sellers are responsible for the quality and safety of related products. For sellers of food-related products who do not establish and implement the incoming inspection system in accordance with the requirements, different levels of penalties are set up from the deadline to "overdue or still do not meet the requirements after correction" and the circumstances are serious, which echoes the aforementioned newly revised discretion norms.

In fact, it is needless to say that this further standardization of regulatory law enforcement efforts is not unrelated to a number of specific law enforcement disputes that have been widely discussed recently. Food safety supervision is a big problem, and in the specific law enforcement practice level, there are problems including the higher threshold of administrative penalties. According to Narada combing the information of existing judgment documents, in the field of food safety, there are not a few cases of administrative litigation brought by businesses because they think that "small punishment is too heavy", and specific judicial discretion also has a dilemma in this judgment: More than half of the judgment results show that the court supports the "heavy penalty" of the market supervision department, and nearly 40% of the cases require the change of the heavy penalty result based on the principle of "excessive penalty is equivalent".

This new regulation of the State Administration of Market Regulation, first of all, is a kind of occupational risk anxiety relief for grassroots law enforcement personnel, there are specific guidelines of the new regulation, the application of established administrative punishment discretion benchmark in specific cases "may be obviously improper, obviously unfair" and other situations, only need "the approval of the main person in charge of the department or collective discussion passed". The relevant penalties can be adjusted to avoid the situation where, as the law enforcers say, "they dare not be lenient or mitigated, let alone exempted from punishment". As long as the conditions for leniency, mitigation or exemption from punishment are met, both the supervised objects and the grassroots law enforcers must have smooth enough channels and convenient enough procedures to put forward and realize propositions, which is the goal of continuous improvement of the system.

In particular, it is worth mentioning that the new regulation also clearly adds the principle of fairness and justice to the basic principles of the exercise of administrative penalty discretion, and proposes that administrative penalties should be imposed on illegal acts that are basically the same in terms of illegal facts, nature, circumstances, and degree of social harm, and the applicable legal basis, types and ranges of penalties should be basically the same. In order to prevent the phenomenon of uneven punishment and different penalties in different cases. In conjunction with it, it is necessary to carry out normalized publicity and exchange of punishment information for class cases at the national level, so as to facilitate the reference of law enforcement departments.

The new rules of administrative punishment discretion in the field of market supervision, in addition to releasing a very clear signal of normative law enforcement and human law enforcement, and making detailed guidance for specific grassroots law enforcement, also let ordinary members of society have a basically stable prediction of their own market environment and the regulatory scale they may encounter. At the same time, the new regulations also put forward higher requirements for the standardization of law enforcement, and the specific application of the basis of the discretion of administrative punishment should be clarified in the written decision on administrative law enforcement, which not only meets the requirements of the "law enforcement who promotes the law" responsibility system, but also objectively protects the rights and interests of informed supervision for market players, and tries to resolve disputes as much as possible. To ensure that members of society have the most basic prediction of the unity and balance of supervision and law enforcement.

The fundamental goal of regulating regulatory law enforcement is to gradually establish and clarify a set of transparent law enforcement procedures and unified regulatory standards, and provide market players and all members of society with stable institutional expectations through an operable, enforceable, supervised and accountable power operation mechanism.

Source: Southern Metropolis Daily