Dr. DO Hai Ha (“Ha”) is an expert on Vietnamese law and society. Ha was trained in law in both Vietnam and Australia, completing a PhD at the University of Melbourne Law School. His dissertation, The Dynamics of Legal Transplantation: Regulating Industrial Conflicts in Post-Đổi mới Vietnam, assesses how foreign and international norms regulating industrial conflicts were transferred to Vietnam between 1994—2013. Ha has co-written and solo-authored a number of pieces of writing on legal changes in transitional socialist Vietnam, with a diverse focus on collective labour law, the legal profession and the doctrinal and constitutional foundation of the legal system. His writing pays particular attention to the epistemological and institutional legacies of the high socialist era, their transformation and impact on contemporary Vietnam.
Ha had several years working in Vietnam in different capacities, including working as a legal academic, practitioner and development expert (collaborating extensively with the ILO and other foreign donors). Most recently, he was a Research Fellow at the Asian Law Centre at the University of Melbourne Law School, where he collaborated with Dean Nicholson to explore the legal profession in Vietnam. Within the CLD project, Ha will explore the Chinese influence on Vietnamese labour law (and law and development, more generally); according to some, at least, Vietnam has wrestled the title of ‘factory of the world’ from China.
Challenging Wrongful Conviction: The Rise, Decline and Lasting Impact of Criminal Activist Lawyers in Vietnam
Abstract
Inspired by the Party-state’s promises of judicial reforms and utilising the new spaces created by these reforms, lawyers in Vietnam became increasingly activist in tackling wrongful convictions from the mid-2000s. Their activism achieved modest success in individual cases, pressing the Party-state to pay more attention to the problem and introduce some procedural reforms. Seeing such activism as a threat, and in line with its declining toleration of human rights advocacy, the Party-state has exerted mounting pressure on activist lawyers, prompting them to retreat in recent years. Notwithstanding this, the attempts of activist lawyers, many of which developed into public political-legal campaigns, aspire to have lasting impacts on the future of human rights in Vietnam, including: (i) a rising awareness of human rights in criminal proceedings and other liberal legal ideas; (ii) a more united legal profession which have increasingly seen themselves as important actors in the administration of justice, operating independently from the Party-state; and (iii) the emergence of loosely connected networks between activist lawyers and between them and other human rights advocates.