Legal Dictionary of Pakistan

citizen suit

An action under a statute giving citizens the right to sue violators of the law (esp. environmental law) and to seek injunctive relief and penalties. 0 In the 1970s, during the heyday of antipollution statutes such as the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, legislators believed that regulators sometimes become too close to the industries they oversee and, as a result, lack the aggressiveness that individual citizens would be able to bring to litigation. The statutes therefore included provisions authorizing people to be "private attorneys general" to protect the environment, seeking not only injunctions to stop pollution but also penalties to be paid to the U.S. Treasury.