NTO - Fighting 'policy corruption'

On August 14, 2023, the Government issued Resolution 126/NQ-CP on improving the quality of work on building and perfecting the legal system and organizing law enforcement to prevent corruption, group interests and local interests.

What is corruption and vested interests in law making?

Resolution 126/NQ-CP clearly states: In the past time, the Government, the Prime Minister, ministers, heads of ministerial-level agencies, and localities have focused a lot of time and resources, and applied many solutions to promote the work of building and perfecting the legal system and organizing law enforcement. However, in the face of the requirements of the new situation, the work of building and perfecting the legal system and organizing law enforcement still reveals some shortcomings.

In order to improve the quality of the work of building and perfecting the legal system and organizing law enforcement, preventing and combating corruption, group interests, and negativity in the work of building laws, the Government requests ministers, heads of ministerial-level agencies, and chairmen of People's Committees of provinces and centrally run cities to review and evaluate the results of the implementation of the direction of the Central Executive Committee, the Politburo, the Secretariat, the National Assembly, the National Assembly Standing Committee, the Government, the Prime Minister, People's Councils, and People's Committees of provinces and centrally run cities on the work of building institutions and organizing law enforcement, and to detect shortcomings and difficulties.

Scene of the mid-term conference of the 13th Party Central Committee on controlling power and preventing and combating corruption and negativity in personnel work, morning of May 15, 2023. Photo: Tri Dung/VNA

So what is corruption in law-making? Corruption in law-making together with corruption in law enforcement constitute the act of “policy corruption”.

Corruption in law-making, although leaving great consequences for the legal system in particular and society in general, is more difficult to recognize than ordinary acts of corruption.

Corruption in law-making goes hand in hand with group interests, local interests of a sector, a collective, or a number of entities. Only when there is a connection between many competent entities in different fields can a policy or a law be “rectified” to serve the interests of a group of people, that is, to illegally interfere in the distribution of benefits at the scale of a sector, locality, or nation.

According to Associate Professor, Doctor Nguyen Quoc Su (Hanoi University of Home Affairs), there are two basic interest groups that want to influence policies and laws: One is the state management agencies assigned to prepare legislative and regulatory projects that often aim at the interests of the sectors and fields they are in charge of. The other is the subjects affected by the policies, who hope that when issued, policies and laws will create advantages in the production and business activities of enterprises.

Corruption in law-making begins with policy selection (choosing issues to serve the interests of sectors and groups to legislate), followed by drafting policies into laws ("inserting" words to serve group interests - said National Assembly Chairman Vuong Dinh Hue), and finally the stage of passing and promulgating laws (lobbying).

Common manifestations of corruption and vested interests in law-making are illegal, non-transparent policy advocacy that does not aim to harmonize interests in society; bribing authorities to select issues, draft and promulgate policies to serve the interests of the sector or a group of subjects. This is called “policy-running”.

“Policy manipulation” is a concrete manifestation of non-transparent policy advocacy, which is biased and disrupts the necessary objectivity of policy makers. This causes inequality in society, causing the country’s resources to only serve certain subjects, benefiting one sector or group of people but harming the interests of other sectors and other people, and ultimately weakening the country and the regime.

Bias in policy making is more evident in economic laws, when a large enterprise uses its financial advantage to influence the making of laws to benefit itself and oppress weak enterprises and infringe on the interests of consumers.

Avoid formality in social criticism

Organizing social criticism and collecting public opinions is an important step in the law-making process in our country.

Resolution 126/NQ-CP requires resolute handling of "corruption, negativity, and group interests" in law-making work, and a specific measure is to focus on organizing dialogues with businesses and people.

The 2013 Constitution provides basic provisions that competent authorities must create conditions for people to contribute their opinions during the law-making process.

The Law on Promulgation of Legal Documents was issued in 2015 and was amended and supplemented in 2020. This law stipulates that agencies, organizations, National Assembly deputies who are in charge of drafting legal documents and relevant agencies and organizations are responsible for creating conditions for agencies, organizations and individuals to contribute opinions on legal documents and draft laws; for the Vietnam Fatherland Front to conduct social criticism; and to collect opinions from subjects directly affected by the law. Opinions from agencies, organizations and people will help law-making and promulgating agencies have a diverse view, close to life, avoiding subjectivity and one-sided imposition.

Regarding which specific bills need to be consulted with the people, Clause 1, Article 39 of the Law on Promulgation of Legal Documents stipulates: Based on the nature and content of the draft law or draft ordinance, the National Assembly and the National Assembly Standing Committee shall decide on the consultation with the people.

Gathering broad public opinion on draft laws must absolutely avoid formalism, avoiding the situation where people's thoughts and aspirations "fall into a void" and are rarely collected and accepted by competent authorities.

Organizing social criticism and collecting public opinions is carried out in many ways: organizing collective discussions according to residential areas (residential groups, wards, communes, etc.); organizing discussions at agencies, unions, and professional social organizations; organizing sociological surveys; creating websites to create forums to discuss issues of the draft law; establishing email boxes to receive comments and contributions, etc.

However, in reality, the current method of collecting public opinions is mainly done by posting bills and draft ordinances on the Electronic Information Portal of ministries, branches and localities, and is rarely done in the form of seminars, through mass media, or direct dialogue between policy and law making agencies and directly affected subjects. Simply posting legal documents on the Electronic Information Portal is the easiest and least effective way.

According to the Ministry of Justice, there is currently a situation where many agencies and organizations, when asked for their opinions on a policy or law, do not provide any comments or give a general response of “agreement”. The same is true for those affected by the law, many people do not have the awareness to contribute to the development of the law or do not have the capacity to respond.

To make social criticism in law-making more practical, researcher Vo Tri Hao (Faculty of Law, Hanoi National University) proposed: The method of collecting public opinions should depend on the nature of the bill. If the bill is related to the interests of many social classes, related to the basic rights and obligations of citizens, and basic national issues, it is necessary to collect opinions by organizing collective discussions according to the area of residence.

If the bill has many specialized contents, it is necessary to seek opinions from experts. It is necessary to create forums for different opinions to be expressed, avoiding the lack of objectivity of the opinion-gathering agency through the selection of the consulted agency. Based on the current wide-area information network of the Government, the State should build more forums for information and exchange on policies and laws and serve the online opinion-gathering.

There should be rules defining the content, scope, format and time for public consultation on draft laws and draft ordinances. The time must be long enough and the information must be complete so that the people can correctly understand the content of the draft. The President, the Chief Justice of the Supreme People's Court, or at least 1/3 of the National Assembly deputies can request the National Assembly to discuss and consider submitting certain draft laws and draft ordinances for public consultation.

Collecting and absorbing public opinions is very important and needs to be done seriously.

All contributions in various forms (conclusions of seminars on people's discussion forums, direct letters; opinions received from National Assembly deputies through contact with voters; opinions received by state agencies and other organizations) must be fully collected and processed.

All information and opinions related to the bill must be concentrated at a single final point for processing, which could be the Office of the National Assembly.

Collecting and processing comments objectively and honestly will help lawmakers have a realistic view and make commenters believe that their opinions are reflected and their actions are meaningful.

According to VNA/Tin Tuc Newspaper

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