"The quality of legal production and enforcement by 14 ministries is generally not high and legal development is better than enforcement. The quality of legal enforcement is rated average only,” said a report on “Assessment of Business-related Legal Development and Enforcement by Ministries” released by the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) in Hanoi.
According to lawyer Tran Huu Huynh, Vice General Secretary and Chief of Legislative Department, VCCI, the survey programme on assessment of business-related legal development and enforcement by ministries, or in short Legal Development Assessment and Enforcement (LDEA), is the study on the assessment of business associations on the openness, transparency, proactiveness and efficiency of law and regulation development and enforcement at Vietnamese ministries. LDEA was applied to law development and enforcement from 2005 to 2009.
LDEA 2010 is based on VCCI’s idea in order to exercise the function of making proposals and advising the Party and the State on legal issues and socioeconomic policies so as to improve the business environment, and effectuate the Resolution 48-NQ/TW regarding Strategy for Developing and Perfecting the Legal System of Vietnam up to 2010 and with orientations to 2020.
LDEA surveyed 124 business associations presenting approximately 77,000 companies all over the country. Participants are national and provincial business associations. Fourteen surveyed ministries include the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the Ministry of Transport, the Ministry of Planning and Investment, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, the Ministry of Information and Communications, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, the Ministry of Construction, the Ministry of Health, and the State Bank of Vietnam.
Construction and Health Ministries at the bottom
According to the report, the quality of legal production and development activities is good while the quality of legal documents is merely average. Notably, the Ministry of Construction bottoms the list of business-related ministries.
The quality of law enforcement is rated high in some criteria (the highest score in four surveyed criteria includes collecting opinions for lawmaking, assessing the quality of legal documents, assessing the accessibility to legal information, and assessing law enforcement). The accessibility to legal information is rated the lowest.
Regarding response to business-related complaints, surveyed associations condemn irregularly thin feedbacks of ministries. Less than 30 % of interviewees said ministries replied to their troubles. The Ministry of Health had the least %age of frequent feedbacks, with only 9.76 %. Besides, if they received the feedback from ministries, they need to wait for a long time to have their matters settled. About a half of associations said they had to wait about one month to receive answers and some even had to wait on in even two years.
About a half of associations were satisfied with replied contents. The degree of satisfaction of associations is in direct ratio to the rate of response and the waiting time. Thus, only two ministries (Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Industry and Trade) got average scores while the rest had relatively low scores.
In addition, according to the report, the hardest difficulty of associations is the accessibility to information. They could not access draft legal documents to contribute their opinions.
Associations said the unsatisfactory quality of legal documents caused difficulties in enforcement, given slow amendments to match new social relations, overlapping, contradiction and unclearness of legal documents. Besides, they pointed out that the legal construction was inclined to facilitate the operation of state organs, not legitimate rights and interests of enterprises.
The law enforcement of ministries has not solved difficulties for corporations and associations. The construction and issuance of instructive documents for legal documents at ministries remain too slow for actual activities of enterprises. Many ministries slowly responded to difficulties and queries of enterprises while their ineffective inspection, examination and supervision led to corruption and profligacy. Sanctions were unclear and general, resulting to inconsistence.
Associations should be seen as partners
To overcome above difficulties, associations proposed several solutions like enhancing the quality of lawmaking opinion collection of ministries. Ministries should regard associations as partners, a channel of policy and regime commenting and criticising. Ministries should spend reasonable time on collecting comments, apply proper, clear feedback regimes to let people and associations know the standpoint of ministries on matters of common concerns.
In addition, associations said ministries need to improve the quality of legal documents with respect to their speciality. Legal provisions must be clear, straightforward and complete to prevent the act of dodging the law.
On the other hand, ministries need to heighten the legal enforcement. They need to develop proper programmes to raise the law consciousness for people and enterprises, closely supervise the implementation to put crackdown on violators. Punishments must be unequivocal and severe. In particular, they should regularly review their law enforcement to make adjustments as soon as possible.
Quynh Chi
Vietnamese
