The Supreme People's Court (SPC) and the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) jointly released a judicial interpretation on several issues concerning the application of laws in handling criminal cases regarding damage of wildlife resources on April 7. The interpretation took effect on April 9.

The interpretation adjusted conviction and sentencing standards for crimes of damaging wildlife resources, which include smuggling rare animals and rare animal products, illegal fishing for aquatic products, harming rare and endangered wildlife, and illegal hunting, acquisition, transport and sale of terrestrial wild animals. The previous interpretation stipulated conviction and punishment for those crimes based on the amount of animals involved, which are not adaptable to the complexity of crimes nowadays. Thus the updated interpretation takes value instead of amount involved in the cases as the basic conviction standard.

The interpretation aims to punish those in the whole profit chain of the crimes. Behaviors of acquiring and selling illegally caught aquatic products or illegally hunted wildlife will be convicted as crime of concealing the proceeds of crimes. Conviction standards for those crimes committed for food purposes were also specified in the interpretation.

The interpretation also clarified the rules on handling cases of artificially bred wild animals. Advanced technology has made some endangered wild animals to be artificially bred. Cases involving such wild animals should be handled differently in terms of criminal investigation. Specifically, cases involving animals which are included in the catalog of key wildlife under national protection for artificial breeding, or those transacted and transported as pets due to the mature artificial breeding technology, will generally not be taken as criminal cases or should be handled with leniency according to law if have to.