Protection of constitutional rights to liberty and security of person in the Penal Code 2015 of Vietnam

Abstract

By referring to the International Conventions on Human Rights, The Constitution of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam of 2013 and the Resolution of the Communist Party of Vietnam on judicial reform, the article points out that the right to liberty and the security of person are human rights and citizenship rights which are protected by Vietnamese law. This is also the basis for the article to evaluate the protection of liberty and personal security provided by the provisions of the Vietnam Penal Code of 2015, revised in 2017. As a result, the article proposes solutions to further improve the criminal policy and the Penal Code regulations towards strengthening the protection of human rights in general, the right to liberty and the security of person in particular. The approach and legal basis of this study is a human rights based approach, centered on human rights to evaluate and propose solutions to the issues. With this approach, the article adopts the general standards of personal freedom and security in international law as the basic criterion for evaluating and proposing amendments of Vietnamese criminal law regulations on protecting the liberty and personal security. In the process of this study, specific research methods were used including the synthetic method, the analytical method and the comparative method. These methods are used to: synthesize the views, awareness of the need to protect freedom and personal security by criminal law; analyze the contents of the relevant regulations in the Vietnamese criminal law; compare with international law standards and crime statistics to assess the suitability and effectiveness of these regulations in Vietnamese criminal law.