With the role of presiding over drafting the Penal Code 2015, the Ministry of Justice has share of responsibility in errors causing the code effectiveness’s delay, said Deputy Minister of Justice Tran Tien Dung who is also the ministry’s spokesman at a press conference yesterday.
The National Assembly has issued a resolution to delay the effective time of the Penal Code 2015 to amend and supplement a number of articles.
At a press conference, Mr. Dung said that the amended Penal Code had been built in accordance with the sequence of legal document issue regulated at the Law on Legal Document Promulgation 2008.
In the upcoming time, the ministry would work with relevant agencies to modify the Penal Code and wait for instructions from higher authorities about who will be held responsible for the errors and how they will be handled.
Head of the Criminal and Administrative Law Department Nguyen Thi Kim Thoa said that authorized agencies have examined to Article 200 of the Penal Code and none of them has proposed to change Article 292 on conditional business sectors. The article is not contradictory with the Investment Law 2014.
However, experts said that Article 292 contains largely legal risks for businesses. For instance, virtual gold trading is illegal and might face criminal charges although it is neither banned nor conditional sector in the Investment Law 2014.
Related to compensation to Mr. Luong Ngoc Phi who was wrongfully convicted in a fraud case in the northern province of Thai Binh, deputy head of the State Compensation Department Tran Viet Hung said that the Ministry of Finance has officially allocated VND23 billion (US$1.03 million) to compensate Mr. Phi.
However, conducting the compensation comes with the competence of the judiciary. Therefore, the department has yet to receive any official document about this.
Mr. Hung said that is a legal framework problem which the department has proposed to change in the draft State Compensation Law in the upcoming time.
Answering press queries on lawyer practice certificate revocation to Cao Van Hung, former principal investigator in the unjust sentence of Mr. Huynh Van Nen, deputy head of the Justice Support Department Nguyen Thi Mai said that the department has sent documents to the Lawyer Association in Binh Thuan province and the Forest Protection Unit in Ham Thuan Bac district to verify information related to the former investigator such as working time, his behaviors and background.
The department has worked with the Vietnam Bar Federation and the Binh Thuan Lawyer Association to consider the revocation and completely handle the case, she said.
Deputy Minister Tran Tien Dung required the agency to speed up the case’s process and announce results in the next press conference of the ministry in the third quarter.
According to the Ministry of Justice, they looked into 1,443 legal documents and found 58 illegal including 22 documents issued by ministries and agencies and 36 by local authorities in the first half this year.
So far, the ministry has already handled nine documents, had solutions for 16 others and worked to settle 33 documents.
