VIETNAM: JUSTICE MINISTRY PROPOUNDS REDUCTION OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

Tran Tien Dung, chief secretariat of the Vietnamese Ministry of Justice, said the Ministry had suggested the Government to consider limiting the scope of capital punishment.
The proposal is included in a report submitted by the ministry to the government about an orientation for amending the Penal Code, Tran Tien Dung said at a press briefing to review the justice sector’s performance in the first quarter of 2014.
In 1985, the Penal Code stipulated 29 charges subjected to the death penalty. After that, the Code underwent four amendments, which brought the number of charges facing death to 44. In 1999, the Code was revised again and the number of offenses subject to the death penalty was reduced to 29. The Penal Code was also amended in 2009, which reduced to 22 the number of crimes punishable by the death penalty.
In a conference on death penalty reduction jointly organized in Hanoi by the Ministry of Justice and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in late December 2013, many law experts suggested that the highest penalty should be abolished for other 9 of the 22 above counts. If the proposal is approved in the future, this means the number of charges subject to a capital sentence will be lowered to 13.