US embassy cable - 03HANOI1411

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 HANOI 001411 
 
SIPDIS 
 
STATE FOR EAP/BCLTV, DRL, and DRL/PHD 
 
E.O. 12958:  N/A 
TAGS: PGOV, PHUM, EAID, SOCI, VM 
SUBJECT: TRAINING VIETNAM'S JUDGES:  MORE WORK NEEDED 
 
Ref:  A)  HCMC 0499 and previous 
 
      B)  HANOI 0935 
      C)  FBIS SEP20021128000048 
      D)  02 HANOI 2902 
 
1.  (U)  Summary:  The low quality of professional skills 
among Vietnamese judges at all levels -- local, provincial 
and national -- is a well-recognized problem (refs c & d). 
Judges for the high-profile Nam Cam trial in Ho Chi Minh 
City (ref a) were carefully picked from among the best 
available throughout the country.  Undergraduate legal 
education became available only in 1979, and not until 1990 
were new judges required to have even a bachelor's degree. 
Efforts to provide intensive specialized training for judges 
began in 1998 with the creation of a Ministry of Justice 
(MOJ)-managed training school.  The GVN is debating the 
merits of establishing a National Judicial Training Academy 
to help improve the quality of judges and other court 
personnel.  The GVN welcomes foreign technical assistance, 
including from the U.S., to improve the quality of its 
judges.  End summary. 
 
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Humble beginnings 
----------------- 
 
2.   (U)  Vietnam did not even have a Ministry of Justice 
between 1960 and 1981; thereafter, it was considered a very 
backwater and under-funded Ministry until at least the 
1990s.  (Its subsequent rise was demonstrated with its move 
in 2002 to the elegantly refurbished -- at least on the 
exterior -- old Soviet Embassy buildings on a major 
thoroughfare.)  No tertiary-level legal education was 
available until 1979.  Judges were not required to have a 
bachelor-level degree -- in any field -- until 1990. 
 
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Academic Training 
----------------- 
 
3.  (U)  In Vietnam, academic legal education is offered 
primarily by the Hanoi Law University, the Ho Chi Minh City 
Law University, and the Law Faculty of Hanoi National 
University, although smaller law faculties also exist at Hue 
University, Can Tho University, Dalat University, and the 
National Police Academy.  The Hanoi Law University, 
established in 1979, is the largest and most prestigious 
legal education program in term of numbers of students and 
lecturers.  The Ho Chi Minh City Law University was 
established in 1987, initially as a branch of the Hanoi Law 
University.  Private institutions are not yet allowed to 
provide legal training, according to one law professor. 
Vice Rector of the Hanoi Law University Le Hong Hanh told 
poloffs that training at law colleges, even at the graduate 
level, is abstract and not tailored for professional judges, 
trial attorneys, prosecutors, or other court officials. 
Graduates from law colleges are not trained for specific 
functions such as being a prosecutor, he asserted.  The 
Police Academy, under the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), 
reportedly provides a more vocational approach, but only for 
MPS staff. 
 
4.  (U)  The law bachelor's curriculum requires four years. 
One and a half years are devoted to classes mandated by the 
Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) for all Vietnamese 
college students, including Marxist-Leninist ideology and Ho 
Chi Minh thought, "scientific socialism," foreign languages, 
and computer courses.  There is a separate set of core 
courses for all law students that provides basic courses in 
various fields of law -- criminal, civil, family, 
administrative, labor, land, financial, banking, and 
international.  The core law course also includes a set of 
historical and comparative law classes covering theories of 
relations between "the state and the law," culminating in a 
specific study of state and law relations in Vietnam.  This 
sequence, together with the compulsory courses, places the 
law and courts in the clear context of a state "guided" by 
the CPV.  The final part of the law school curriculum is 
composed of specialized courses in the fields of law 
mentioned above as well as related classes such as criminal 
investigation, forensics, auditing, intellectual property, 
and contracts. 
 
5.  (U)  According to law professors, there is currently 
some internal debate over how to handle "unclear issues" in 
the curriculum over the CPV's future role in the kind of 
"rule of law" state that Vietnam is becoming.  The formal 
curriculum still hews closely to "the Party line," but there 
are a few "study groups" including professors and students 
that discuss such issues "rather freely," according to some 
foreign-educated professors. 
 
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Training the next generation of judges 
-------------------------------------- 
 
6.  (U)  In January 2002, a CPV Politburo resolution on 
"urgent judicial tasks" identified judicial training as a 
national priority.  Also in 2002, the National Assembly 
revised the Ordinance on Judges and Lay Assessors to mandate 
that all future judges hold a certificate from MOJ's 
training school, which had been set up in 1998, prior to 
appointment.  (The requirement does not hold for sitting 
judges.)  Lay assessors, who also sit on court panels and 
decide cases alongside judges, still receive very little 
training (ref b). 
 
7.  (U)  According to the MOJ school director, Dr. Phan Huu 
Thu, there have been six sessions of these one-year courses 
for "judges to be" thus far.  Participants -- mostly court 
clerks with several years of experience assisting judges 
administratively -- are selected by district and provincial 
courts for their potential to win appointment as judges. 
They must also be otherwise qualified for the bench: 
candidates must be "reliable," have a bachelor's degree in 
law, be of "good character," and have at least four years 
experience in the legal field for appointment to a district 
court (six years for a provincial court).  CPV membership is 
not a formal requirement.  Beginning in 2004, the school 
will require an entrance exam to make sure that all 
applicants are sufficient qualified academically, Thu said. 
The school also has courses for other legal officials 
including clerks of court, notaries, and executors (court 
officials charged with ensuring that sentences are carried 
out and that appeals are handled correctly). 
 
8.  (U)  Dr. Thu said roughly 60 per cent of course 
graduates had already been appointed to the bench.  The 
aspiring judges spend eight months in the classroom.  Almost 
all of this time is devoted to the Criminal Procedures Code 
and on case studies based on it, as well as on 
practicalities such as how to issue an arrest warrant. 
According to Dr. Thu (who matriculated at a French law 
school), the case study method used borrows elements from 
France, Japan, Germany, and the U.S.  Students then intern 
for two and a half months at a court in their home province, 
and devote the final month to preparing for and taking the 
final exam.  Apparently, nearly everyone passes. 
 
9.  (U)  Dr. Thu claimed his school had already made 
important contributions to improving the quality of new 
judges, attorneys, and other court officials.  However, he 
expressed regret that the school is still unable to provide 
in-service training for existing judges -- many of whom have 
had little or no formal academic training.  Nor has the 
school provided training for specialized judges serving in 
the Labor or Economic Courts.  Management of trials is not 
part of the curriculum, and very little attention is given 
to the role of the judge. 
 
--------------------------------------------- --- 
Other Training for Court and Procuracy Officials 
--------------------------------------------- --- 
 
10.  (U)  The Supreme People's Court (SPC) and the Supreme 
People's Procuracy (SPP) also manage separate schools 
providing professional training for their respective staffs. 
The SPC training school, established in 1994, is a modest 
affair with just a few rotating trainers, providing only 
short-term training.  Serving judges teach the courses. 
Some courses cover relevant laws for judges newly assigned 
to various specialized courts.  There are also general in- 
service training courses lasting one to two months that 
include topics ranging from how to interpret laws to 
courtroom management.  A main focus has been to provide at 
least some training for pre-1990 appointees who often have 
little or no formal training.  SPC officials say that they 
would like to expand the school, currently housed in four or 
five dilapidated rooms of the SPC building in Hanoi, to 
provide more thorough training, but lament that there is no 
funding to do so. 
 
11.  (U)  The SPP runs two "colleges" -- in Ho Chi Minh City 
and in Hanoi -- providing both short-term and long-term 
training for prosecutors and other Procuracy staff.  The 
colleges no longer offer bachelor's degree programs but 
instead offer a one-year intensive course for Procuracy 
employees who already have bachelor's degrees in law.  This 
certificate is now a requirement for appointment as a 
prosecutor. 
 
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A National Judicial Academy? 
---------------------------- 
 
12.  (U)  According to Director Thu of the MOJ training 
school, discussions are underway on the establishment of a 
national judicial academy to provide advanced training for 
all types of court officials, merging the separate 
institutes under the Ministry of Justice, the Supreme 
People's Court, and the Supreme People's Procuracy.  At 
present, the differing approaches of these schools 
reportedly have led to a less than harmonious approach to 
legal training.  Thu said he personally favored putting the 
academy under the Ministry of Justice. 
 
13.  (U)  Le Huu The, Director of the SPP Procuratorial 
Science Institute, and Nguyen Van Don, Director of the Hanoi 
Procuracy College, separately dismissed the necessity of 
making their training institutions part of a bigger academy. 
Both pointed out that the training of employees must be in 
line with the Procuracy's overall personnel plan and 
underscored their discomfort with the idea of the MOJ 
running an institution that would train Procuracy staff. 
 
14.  (U)  Deputy Director Ngo Cuong of the SPC Judicial 
Science Institute also voiced doubts that the MOJ would do a 
good job running such an institution.  Cuong criticized the 
current MOJ training school for being already unable to meet 
the needs of its students and their employers.  Cuong 
claimed that the school's curriculum was too focused on how 
to carry out procedural functions such as issuing documents. 
According to Cuong, "most of the students in classes for 
judges have long worked as clerks of court.  They should 
already know court procedures very well."  Cuong criticized 
the MOJ school for failing to provide practical training on 
how to run a courtroom and how to deal with actual cases. 
He admitted that the MOJ school is useful for training 
notaries and executors, and perhaps even attorneys, but 
asserted that the SPC should take the lead in both long- and 
short-term professional training for judges. 
 
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Comment 
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15.  (U)  However the GVN decides to train judges, part of 
their training must be to develop the role of the judge as 
an impartial "moderator" between prosecutor and defense 
attorney.  Officials such as the SPC's Cuong recognize this 
and complain that current training neglects this aspect of a 
judge's work and perpetuates the dominant role of the 
prosecutor in the courtroom, where approximately 95 pct of 
all cases end in conviction.  (Even higher during the just- 
concluded Nam Cam case.)  Common wisdom in Vietnam holds 
that prosecutors and judges generally determine the outcomes 
of trials before they even begin.  One attorney claimed that 
judges have been known to ask defendants questions such as, 
"When did you commit the crime?" 
 
16.  (U)  CPV and GVN officials have spoken of the need for 
speeding up Vietnam judicial reform process for several 
years, and have prioritized upgrading the capabilities of 
judges and other court officials.  This will require not 
only elevating the role and responsibility of judges, but 
also allowing defense attorneys to operate on a more 
genuinely equal footing with prosecutors (septel).  It will 
require years to develop genuinely knowledgeable judges and 
defense attorneys, as well as to overcome a legal culture 
dominated by prosecutors and police. 
 
17.  (U)  Some USG assistance is already underway toward the 
goal of improving the quality of judges through mechanisms 
such as the USAID-funded STAR program (in support of U.S.- 
Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement implementation), the U.S.- 
Vietnam Trade Council BTA and legal curriculum programs, and 
PAS International Visitors programs.  The UNDP Legal Needs 
Assessment (ref d) targets areas for foreign technical 
assistance, including strengthening the legal education 
system.  Vietnamese judges, from Presiding Judge of the 
Supreme People's Court Nguyen Van Hien on down, have 
expressed strong interest in learning more about the U.S. 
court system.  A delegation from the Supreme People's Court, 
possibly led by Justice Hien, is planning to visit the U.S. 
in summer 2003 under the auspices of the STAR program. 
PORTER