On 19/08/2022 the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung Vietnam and the Ministry of Justice Vietnam jointly hosted a highly relevant seminar on “Legal development on juvenile justice in Vietnam”.

The past few years, Vietnam has made great progress in improving the legal system for juveniles, whether juvenile offenders or minor victims and witnesses in criminal cases. Some important laws such as the Criminal Code, the Criminal Procedure Law, Law on Criminal Judgment Execution, Law on Children, Law on Organization of People's Courts… have been amended with regard to making the procedure friendlier and safeguarding the interests of juveniles.

However, according to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, Vietnam is lack of "a comprehensive justice system for minors” while many other countries in the Asia-Pacific region and worldwide have their own juvenile justice system.

Thus, through this seminar, KAS Vietnam and the Ministry of Justice provided a forum for exchange and discussion of important issues related to juvenile justice. More than 130 law-makers, judicial officials, court officials participated actively in the seminar. Besides, we also had the special participation of Chief Judge Daniela Kirchhof from Braunschweig, Germany; she has provided an extensive introduction to the German Juvenile Justice System. As one of the first countries in Europe to establish juvenile justice and enact the Juvenile Justice Act, Germany has more than 100 years of experience in building and developing juvenile law. Therefore, the experience of Germany will be a valuable resource for Vietnam to refer to in the process of developing a law on juvenile justice.

As addressed in the seminar, KAS Vietnam Resident Representative Florian Feyerabend highly appreciated Vietnam’s effort in improving the legal system for juveniles; when the seminar was an important forum to exchange and discuss major issues related to Vietnam juvenile justice such as legal proceedings, diversion measures, coordination mechanism, social work profession in juvenile justice, community reintegration, etc., and then the contents of the workshop will be used as research materials to perfect the legal framework on justice in Vietnam.