Good Governance

Good Governance and Public Administrative Reforms

The first Danish funded programme on "Good Governance and Public Administrative Reforms" (GOPA I) with a budget of DKK 70 million was implemented from 2008 to March 2012. GOPA I contained (i) a Public Administration Reform (PAR) pillar supporting public administrative reform initiatives in the five remote provinces of Dien Bien, Lao Cai, Lai Chau, Dak Lak and Dak Nong, and (ii) a Human Rights & Education Pillar supporting the strengthening of the National Assembly as well as human rights research and education at Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, Vietnam National University and Ho Chi Minh City Law University.

Building on the achievements and lessons learned from GOPA I, the second phase  (GOPA II ) continued  from April 2012. In addition to continuing the support under the first phase, GOPA II had a new feature, namely the support to NGOs through a grant scheme mechanism consisting of a Grant Fund and a Capacity Building Facility, the Public Participation and Accountability Facilitation Fund (PARAFF). The support helped NGOs to contribute with qualified and evidence-based inputs and dialogue with government authorities and the National Assembly and thus promote public participation and accountability in law-making and policy development processes. GOPA II runs from 2012 to 2016 with a budget of DKK 60 million. The United Kingdom's Department for International Development (DFID) co-funded PARAFF with an amount of nearly £900,000. 

Legal and Judicial Reforms

Denmark has also supported legal and judicial reforms since 1997 as one of the first donors. Initial assistance to the Office of the National Assembly (ONA), the Supreme People's Court (SPC), and the Supreme People's Procuracy (SPP) was provided through UNDP. These three projects represent the first and most significant technical assistance provided to Vietnam's legal development, especially to the Court and the Procuracy since the socialist bloc legal assistance in the 1960s. Three separate, but closely linked, projects were carried out between 1996 and 2000  with Vietnam's highest level legislative, judicial and prosecutorial agencies. From 2001, the support continued in a second phase in the form of a bilateral programme with the same organisations, and a third phase, called Support to Legal and Judicial Reforms in Vietnam (JOPSO), implemented between 2005 and 2009 and co-funded with Sweden and the EU. The budget for the JOPSO programme was DKK 45.5 million. In 2010, the same three donors initiated the Justice Partnership Programme (JPP) (2010-2015). It had a budget of 18.7 million Euro (the Danish contribution was DKK 78.7 million), which made it the largest project of its kind in Vietnam. JPP was aligned with the national Justice Reform Strategy (2005) and followed the objective of "an ethical, democratic and rights-protecting justice sector development".

From 2006-2014, Denmark supported a programme to strengthen the inspectorate system in Vietnam: the 'Programme on Strengthening the Comprehensive Capacity of the Inspectorate Sector' (POSCIS). It was co-funded by Sweden, the Netherlands and Canada, and in the initial stages of the programme, Norway also contributed. The programme aimed at building an inspectorate sector that is ethical, consolidated, step-by-step, professionalised, modern, and capable of effectively implementing inspection, complaint and denunciation handling and anti-corruption tasks. The total Danish contribution was nearly DKK 14 million.