Hanoi (VNA) – National Assembly (NA) Chairman Tran Thanh Man has demanded a “revolution” in how citizens access legal information, calling for a radical shift from a management mindset of simply supplying documents to a service model that equips people to protect themselves using the law.
Building a national digital ecosystem for legal outreach
Speaking in a group debate on the draft revised Law on Legal Dissemination and Education in Hanoi on August 4, Chairman Man said the requirement that “every citizen live and work in accordance with the Constitution and the law” remains hollow unless people can fully access, understand, and actually use the rules that govern their lives.
He called for an aggressive digital transformation push, urging lawmakers to embed a national digital ecosystem for legal education and outreach directly into the bill. The draft must force every issuing agency to hand over open data so AI tools and round-the-clock chatbots can chew through complex regulations and deliver plain answers instantly.
The bill, he said, should mandate feedback loops, gauge citizens’ legal literacy, and track their “legal access health” within the digital space, so authorities can recalibrate outreach in real time. It must also introduce quantitative criteria to slice target groups by location, age, and livelihood.
On community-based education, the top legislator pressed for firm institutionalisation of the role of grassroots cultural bodies and influential local figures, including village elders, clan heads, and respected individuals, alongside self-governance models. The approach should shift from “comprehensive” dissemination in favour of “practical” access, prioritising laws that directly hit citizens’ rights and interests based on their occupations and places of residence.
A chronic funding squeeze at the commune level and a workforce of mostly part-timers are choking progress, he said, demanding firm staffing targets and dedicated support for those on the front lines.
He pushed for tax breaks, preferential land access, and easier credit to be written directly into the law for businesses and organisations. As for lawyers, the draft must set mandatory annual hours of pro bono legal education and tie that record to performance reviews and professional license renewals.
Commune-level coordination councils for legal dissemination
Deputy Leo Thi Lich from Bac Ninh province warned that a rule restricting legal information access “only through verified accounts” needs its scope sharply defined to avoid trampling on citizens’ constitutional right to obtain and share legal information.
She proposed that the draft law immediately enshrine content quality principles, post-publication review mechanisms, and clear liability for tackling false information, especially when generated or manipulated by AI.
Lich insisted on channels that gauge what users truly grasp and measure whether digital access is actually working, cautioning that “mechanical digitalisation” firing out one-way information is a dead end.
Deputy Tran Thi Hoa Ry from Ca Mau province proposed scrapping a requirement for commune-level councils. Instead, a chairperson of the commune-level People’s Committee should simply assign a specialised unit to handle legal education, or create a council only where it’s genuinely needed under Government rules./.
