'Is the health of Party and State leaders a state secret?'

National Assembly delegates said that if it is a state secret, we must act in accordance with the nature of a state secret, otherwise it must be made public.

This afternoon, November 13, the National Assembly discussed in groups the draft Law on Cyber ​​Security and the draft Law on Protection of State Secrets.

"The information said on the sidewalk is correct again!"

Delegate Bui Dang Dung (Kien Giang delegation) - Vice Chairman of the Finance and Budget Committee of the National Assembly said that in the past, there was talk about espionage, but now the problem is very clear. The problem of revealing state secrets and being restricted from sharing state secret information are two aspects that must be given utmost attention today.

“I work at the Finance and Budget Committee of the National Assembly. Any document related to finance and budget is stamped “Confidential”. If the stamp is confidential, it will be released after 10 years. How long will that secret be kept? Meanwhile, in other countries, the finance and budget are publicly available online. Anyone who accesses the internet knows how the construction process was, how much money is in this year’s budget, and in which field...” - Mr. Dung shared and said that the problem is that there is a situation of abusing confidentiality to limit information.

Delegate Bui Dang Dung spoke at the meeting.

On the other hand, in reality, there is a phenomenon of underestimation and subjectivity, leading to statements at conferences, in articles, discussions at seminars, conversations... revealing state secrets.

“Is a detail about the health of our Party and State leaders a state secret? If it is a state secret, we must act in accordance with the nature of a state secret. If it is not, we must make it completely public,” Mr. Dung questioned. If we do not let people know, many things will spread online, which is not good.

“If we label everything as secret, we will be “stuck” and not be alert to that. Every congress, if we want to get information, we can go to a sidewalk tea shop and ask around for a while and people will say, there are people who make terrible predictions, this person will do this position, that person will do that position, and unfortunately, they are right! It is clear that in terms of personnel organization, there is a matter of leaking state secrets. Where did it come from? We ourselves leak our own secrets. Does this law regulate those things or not?” – delegate Dang Bui Dung said.

“Encrypting” text causes trouble and concealment

Delegate Vu Xuan Hung (Thanh Hoa) said that the practice of leaking state, national, defense and security secrets is quite common. Therefore, the development of a law is necessary.

Regarding the scope of regulation, according to the delegate, in reality, the list of secrets in some sectors and fields includes foreign documents transferred to Vietnam. Therefore, the scope should be expanded to include secret documents transferred to Vietnam by foreign organizations and individuals.

Delegate Vu Xuan Hung (Thanh Hoa)

Regarding prohibited acts, delegate Vu Xuan Hung said that currently, due to limited awareness of protecting state secrets and for many other reasons, there are situations where individuals and organizations arbitrarily take secret documents out.

Delegates also suggested carefully studying the regulations on the list of state secrets that need to be protected to avoid the situation of taking advantage of the regulations to cause trouble for people and businesses, increase administrative procedures or "encrypt" documents to conceal information.

Mr. Vu Xuan Hung also expressed concern when the draft assigned the Chairman of the Provincial People's Committee to establish a list of state secrets. Because, with 63 provinces and cities, there may be a situation where the same list has different levels of confidentiality depending on the assessment of each locality, such as "Secret" in one place but "Top Secret" in another, causing inconsistency.

“If regulated like that, it would be easy to take advantage of concealing information, not disseminating information for personal purposes. Especially with sensitive issues such as land, resources, and minerals, it could be disadvantageous to businesses, investors, and people. Therefore, to ensure a unified list, it should be regulated vertically, that is, from central ministries to local ones, for more uniformity,” delegate Hung suggested.

According to VOV.VN