The National Assembly delegation of Nghe An province collected comments for the second time on the Draft Law on Archives (amended)

At the 6th Session of the 15th National Assembly, the National Assembly reviewed and gave its first opinion and is expected to pass it at the 7th Session (in May 2024).

The Draft Law on Archives (amended) consists of 9 chapters and 68 articles, increasing both the number of chapters and articles compared to the 2011 Law on Archives (consisting of 7 chapters and 42 articles). The Draft Law has added 4 major policies on the authority to manage archival documents, perfected regulations on the management of electronic archival documents, perfected regulations on archive management, and perfected regulations on the management of archival service activities.

Giving comments to complete the Draft Law on Archives (amended), the opinions of the delegates all agreed that amending the law is necessary, in order to institutionalize the Party's guidelines and policies, ensure the consistency and unity of the legal system, and promptly overcome the shortcomings and limitations in the current practice of archival work.

However, some opinions are still concerned that the regulation on the preservation period of records and documents of 70 years and under 70 years is quite long, because the preservation period of different industries and fields is not the same.

Some opinions also suggested that the drafting committee should add provisions on rewards, sanctions and provisions of the Law in Chapter 7 as well as provisions on ensuring information security for electronic archives, in order to digitize to meet the requirements of national digital transformation and building an e-Government.

From the practice of the Archives sector in recent times, compliance with legal documents on the field of archives in general and the 2011 Archives Law in particular has not been seriously implemented. Awareness of the importance of document archiving among a number of leaders, civil servants, and employees currently working in agencies and organizations is very low.

Therefore, the field of archives needs sanctions to ensure that legal regulations in the archives sector are implemented more clearly. If this is not clearly stipulated, violations or non-implementation of legal regulations on archives will continue to occur, such as: Officials and civil servants do not create records, units do not submit records to agency archives, agencies do not submit records and documents to archives, history, or in cases of loss, damage, or misplacement of archives,... there are no sanctions to handle.

In addition, Article 53 of the draft Law stipulates that archival service activities should only include two activities at points a and b of Article 53, which are conditional business lines: Trading in technical infrastructure to preserve paper archives, documents on other information carriers, and trading in technical infrastructure to store digital archives and archive databases because of their high technicality and complexity.

Other comments suggest that the draft Law stipulates policies for archivists and promotes the participation of the whole society in archiving work. The State needs solutions for archivists to disseminate to the people the purpose and meaning of documents; encourage them to declare, voluntarily hand over, donate, transfer, and deposit valuable documents to the archives center.

There should be policies to encourage and recognize individuals, families, and organizations that donate and submit documents to archives, contributing to enriching and better promoting the value of the country's invaluable archives.

The comments will be compiled and studied by the Provincial National Assembly Delegation and commented on at the upcoming National Assembly Session./.