Seeking comments on the draft Law on Archives
(Baonghean) -On the afternoon of September 26, in Vinh City, the National Assembly Delegation of Nghe An Province coordinated with the Department of Home Affairs to collect comments on the draft Law on Archives. Comrade Pham Van Tan - Deputy Head of the National Assembly Delegation of Nghe An Province chaired the meeting.
Issued in 2001, after 10 years of implementation, the Archives Ordinance has revealed some limitations due to the lack of many regulations to regulate new relationships. Therefore, the National Assembly has set the 2nd session, the Archives Law is one of the documents to be issued. Through many additions and comments, the current draft Archives Law consists of 7 chapters, 47 articles, regulating general groups of issues; specific regulations such as collecting archival documents (including creating records, managing records and documents at archival agencies); policies on arranging and determining the value of documents; collecting documents for historical archives; preserving and making statistics of archival documents; using and destroying archival documents...
At the conference, there were 23 opinions from representatives of centers, agencies and archive units in the whole province contributing to the draft, many of which came from practice such as: The Law on Archives needs to fully mention the archival work at the commune level which is too lacking and staff are not qualified; if there is a requirement for electronic archives, there must be a security solution to prevent hackers from entering and stealing data; regulations on keeping originals for archiving so as not to violate other laws (copies have the same value as the original); arrange and invest funds to ensure facilities for archiving because the warehouse system conditions are still limited; state management agencies on archives....
In addition to the above opinions, delegates also boldly proposed to have historical archives at the district level (according to the draft, only at the central and provincial levels) because Nghe An province has a large area, if people are policy subjects with the need to look up, it will be very difficult and hindered; the word "arrange" should be removed from the phrase "arrange, edit"; at the same time, more clearly stipulate who and in what cases can take archival documents out (the new Law only stipulates the prohibition of taking archival documents abroad illegally); add some documents to be preserved permanently; the time limit for declassifying archival documents should be regulated in a direction consistent with international practices and standards.
After receiving, it is expected that the Provincial National Assembly Delegation will synthesize and edit to have opinions to submit to the upcoming National Assembly.
Nguyen Hai
