The 9th working session of the National Assembly of Vietnam, which lasted 35 days and ends on 27 June 2025, is probably the most productive working session of the National Assembly for several decades. In this one working session, the National Assembly has passed a number of laws equal to all laws passed by the National Assembly in 17 previous working sessions.

Immediately after the conclusion of the National Assembly’s working sessions in late June 2025, newspapers and social media in Vietnam were flooded with information about these new laws and regulations. Information about these new laws was important since many of those laws would take effect on 1 July 2025 – only one week after the National Assembly concluded its working session.

As part of our marketing efforts, we also set out to review those laws and resolutions for our legal updates. However, when we first started, our lawyers struggled to locate the final text of many of these laws. For us, a “final text” of a law would be a scanned PDF of these laws bearing the seal of the National Assembly and signatures of the Chairman of the National Assembly or an official publication on official websites such as the Official Gazette or the National Database of Legal Documents.

By the date of this post (30 July 2025), all of the new laws have been officially published. However, according to our research conducted around 10 July 2025,

We could not find on the website of www.thuvienphapluat.vn (TVPL) scanned executed copies of 13 laws out of 34 laws, including the Law on Personal Data Protection, Amendment to the Law on Credit Institutions, Law on Digital Technology Industry, Law on Special Consumption Tax, Law on Employment, and Law on Nuclear Power. We believe that TVPL, as one of the leading providers of accessible legal texts in Vietnam, would have every incentive to collect and publish the final text of the new laws as soon as possible. Therefore, if a document was not available on TVPL’s website, it is unlikely that such document was available anywhere else.
We could not find on the websites of the Official Gazette and the National Database of Legal Documents official copies of 15 laws out of 34 laws, including all other laws described above. Under the Law on Laws, the deadline for publishing these new laws on the Official Gazette and the National Database of Legal Documents had not yet expired on 10 July 2025. However, even if all of these new laws are now published, it does not instill confidence in the public if there are laws that have been passed and have even taken effect but were not officially published in a timely manner.
By 10 July 2025, the President only issued orders to announce 16 laws out of 34 laws. Thereafter, the President issued additional orders to announce the remaining laws on 11 July. Notably, all of the laws slated to take effect from 1 July 2025 were not announced by the President by such date. Under the Constitution, all laws passed by the National Assembly must be announced by the President. Again, applying a new law even before it was announced by the President is not a good practice. Among the laws having effect from 1 July 2025, there are laws with considerable impact, such as the amendment to the Penal Code.

One of the “top” priorities of the Communist Party of Vietnam and the Government of Vietnam is to reform the law-making and law enforcement process. This is evidenced by Resolution 66 of the Politburo and Resolution 197/2025 of the National Assembly. Due process is critical to establishing a rule of law society. In particular, Resolution 66 requires the process of drafting and promulgating legal normative documents to be “democratic, professional, scientific, timely, feasible, and effective”. Therefore, in order to achieve this ambitious objective, the law-making process should be a due process. This post is written by Le Thanh Nhat and Nguyen Quang Vu.

Vietnam Business Law