when the Party and the state manifested their profound concern about the theme,
did debates over the theme proliferate.
In May 2005 , the National Assembly Office held a conference on “the system of
constitutional protection.” In the prelude to the conference, Nguyen Van Yeu, vice
chairman of the NA, stated that
So far, we have not had an effective mechanism to supervise the action
of the National Assembly and review the constitutionality of the NA’s
law and resolution. Therefore, it is imperative to research [and] rec-
ommend an effective remedy to continuously perfect the system of
supervising and protecting the Constitution in Vietnam.
65More significantly, the need to establish a new system of constitutional review
crystallized in 2006 when the Vietnamese Communist Party, at its Tenth Congress,
resolved to “establish a system of adjudicating the constitutionality of the actions of
the legislature, the executive and the judiciary” in Vietnam.
66
The ongoing conun-
drum is whether a constitutional court will be established as per the Austrian or
German model or whether the judicial courts will be vested with the power of
constitutional review as in the American model. In order to deal with the matter, in
2008 the Standing Committee of Vietnam’s National Assembly set up a “Board for
research on establishing a system of adjudicating the constitutionality of the actions
of the legislature, executive and judiciary,” consisting of both influential politicians
and distinguished legal scholars.
These advances have further galvanized Vietnamese legal scholars to deepen the
study of the prospects for constitutional review in Vietnam. There has been a
proliferation of conferences held by the National Assembly Office, the Institute
of State and Law, the Vietnam National University Faculty of Law, the Hanoi Law
School, and others, discussing potential models for constitutional review for Viet-
nam. Moreover, academic articles on constitutional review and constitutional
protection have been published in profusion in national law journals. Vietnamese
legal scholars have discussed a wide range of constitutional review and “consti-
tutional protection” issues in Vietnam.^67 More specifically, they have described
(Constitutional Law and Political Institutions) Vol. 2 (Saigon: 1971 ); Nguyen Do,Luat
hien phap(Constitutional Law) (Saigon: 1974 ).(^65) See proceedings of the conference published as Dang Van Chien (ed.),Co che Bao Hien
(The Mechanism of Constitutional Protection) (Hanoi: Judicial Publishing House, 2005 ),
p. 8.
(^66) Vietnamese Communist Party,Van kien Dai hoi Dai bieu Toan quoc Lan thuX(Documents
of the Tenth National Congress) (Hanoi: National Political Publishing House, 2006 ), p. 127.
(^67) For some books onbao hien, see National Assembly Office and JOPSO,Ky yeu Hoi thao
Quoc te ve Bao hien(Proceedings of International Conference on Constitutional Protec-
tion) (Hanoi: Time Publishing House, 2009 ); Dao Tri Uc and Nguyen Nhu Phat (eds.),
Tai phan Hien phap va Van de Xay dung Mo hinh Tai phan Hien phap o Vietnam
(Constitutional Adjudication and the Problems of Building the Model of Constitutional