Hoàng Mai wrote this article in Vietnamese and published it in Luật Khoa Magazine on March 04, 2025. Đàm Vĩnh Hằng translated it into English for The Vietnamese Magazine.
In its previous installment, this series explored the core contradictions of Việt Nam’s “socialist rule-of-law state”: the tension between empowering state institutions while preserving the Communist Party’s centralized leadership, and the conflict between constitutional law and the supremacy of Party policy.
From these tensions emerges a third, equally significant contradiction: the struggle to reconcile the universal principles of individual human rights with the state’s official collectivist ideology.
The work of Bùi Hải Thiêm of the Institute for Legislative Studies illuminates how the Party-state has navigated this challenge. Although universal human rights have gained traction in Việt Nam’s legal and political discourse, their incorporation remains a cautious and pragmatic process, advancing only within boundaries the Communist Party finds acceptable.
Before the Đổi Mới Era
Before the 1990s, the concept of “human rights” (nhân quyền) was rarely mentioned in Việt Nam’s official discourse and had little impact on the Party-state’s conduct. The term was considered politically sensitive, even taboo.
By its nature, human rights emphasize individual liberties, which are fundamentally at odds with the Party-state’s collectivist ideology. This perspective, rooted in socialist thought, prioritized national sovereignty over individual rights and posited that human rights should be evaluated based on broader social outcomes rather than individual needs. As a result, the official view was that human rights were not a matter for debate but a condition already achieved.
This stance was exemplified by General Secretary Lê Duẩn in 1982, who declared that establishing the people’s government, achieving national independence and reunification, along with economic, cultural, and social achievements, “ensured real human rights.”
In essence, the Party considered the matter settled: rights were granted by the state, could only exist within the legal framework it established, and must not infringe on national sovereignty. Any further discussion was deemed irrelevant, a stance that would only be challenged as Việt Nam began integrating into the region and the world.
The Post-Đổi Mới Era
Perceptions of human rights in Việt Nam shifted significantly in the late 1980s with the launch of economic reforms and the opening to the outside world. From 1992 onward, the development of the socialist rule-of-law state brought human rights into official discourse.
This marked a gradual move away from the prior perspective—where “human rights” were fused with limited “citizens’ rights”—toward one more aligned with universal principles. A key turning point came with amendments to the 1985 Penal Code and 1988 Criminal Procedure Code, which recognized the presumption of innocence and the right to compensation for victims.
The Communist Party’s official engagement with the issue was cautious. In 1992, its Secretariat issued Directive No. 12, affirming a readiness for international cooperation but simultaneously warning against “hostile forces exploiting this issue to sabotage the country.”
To reconcile its socialist model with this new discourse, Party theorists, according to Bùi Hải Thiêm, borrowed from the “Asian values” debate. This allowed leaders to argue that human rights should be assessed within each country’s unique context, providing an intellectual defense against Western criticism.
Yet, the reforms also created new domestic pressures for change. The expansion of the market economy and the growth of the middle class led to greater demand for civil liberties, such as freedom of expression and the right of association. The recent surge of petitions from intellectuals and civil society groups reflects this changing public approach to human rights.
The Constitutional Reform Period
Following the 1992 Constitution, the discourse on human rights in Việt Nam broadened significantly, moving beyond a strictly positivist legal view. This was most evident in the arena of constitutional reform, where scholars and intellectuals, influenced by universal human rights thought, sought to define a stronger legal framework. They increasingly cited Việt Nam’s own 1946 Constitution, a more liberal and democratic version, as a legitimate model for change.
This new thinking presented a direct challenge to the state during the 2013 constitutional amendment process. Reform proposals focused heavily on “negative freedoms”—the rights of individuals to be protected from state interference. These included calls to institutionalize freedom of speech, press, assembly, and the right to protest.
While most of these proposals failed to make it into the final Constitution, they represented a significant challenge to the official socialist rule-of-law doctrine. They highlighted the widening gap between universal principles and the state’s ideology.
Concessions and Limits in the 2013 Revised Constitution
The intense public debate surrounding the 2013 constitutional reform forced the government to make certain concessions. The most notable of these was a major step forward from previous constitutions: the official distinction between “human rights” and “citizens’ rights.”
Article 14 of the revised constitution states:
“In the Socialist Republic of Việt Nam, human rights and citizens’ rights in the political, civil, economic, cultural, and social spheres are recognized, respected, protected, and guaranteed under the Constitution and the law.”
However, this recognition was immediately qualified by strict and expansive restrictions. The same Article 14 continues by giving the state broad power to curtail these rights:
“Human rights and citizens’ rights may only be limited by law in cases deemed necessary for reasons of national defense, national security, social order and safety, social morality, and community health.”
Article 15 further entrenches these limitations, stipulating that:
“The exercise of human rights and citizens’ rights must not infringe upon national interests, the nation, or the legitimate rights and interests of others.”
Such provisions provide the government with wide-ranging legal grounds to suppress civil liberties, reflecting an approach consistent with the “Asian values” framework embraced by Việt Nam and other regional states.
A Synthesis of Conceptions of Human Rights in Việt Nam
According to Bùi Hải Thiêm, the discourse of human rights in Việt Nam has never been fixed or immutable—a pragmatic compromise, not ideological conversion. While influenced by liberal ideas, the reforms lacked a consistent foundation to inspire sweeping change.
The Communist Party may accept the universality of human rights in abstract terms, but it fundamentally disagrees with Western interpretations of their content and implementation. The result is a synthesis of ideologies, calibrated not to the persuasive power of any single doctrine, but to what the ruling Party finds acceptable.
One shift, however, is undeniable: the old model of “pháp chế xã hội chủ nghĩa” (socialist legality) is steadily weakening. The rigid, class-based interpretations of law that once defined the system have all but disappeared from official discourse. This erosion of the old ideology, although not a revolution, paves the way for more dynamic approaches and could enable international human rights law to serve as a more significant theoretical foundation for Việt Nam going forward.