North Viet-Nam's New Draft Constitution

ALMOST SURREPTITIOUSLY, and certainly without arousing comment in the LX. world press, the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam (DRVN) published on April i, i959, the draft of a constitution to replace that proclaimed on November 9, I946 in Hanoi.' According to various official announcements on the issuance of the new text, it merely represents a draft, subject to further amendment after popular discussion. To judge by previous communist practice, however, the new draft will, with only minor changes, probably become the final text. The new draft is as remarkable for what it omits as for what it contains. Framed by a committee of high government and party officials presided over by Ho Chi Minh himself, it had been discussed since April I957 and perhaps even longer. North Vietnamese sources reported in October i958 that the drafting committee had received more than eight hundred suggestions for improvements from organizations throughout the country. Undertaken in the relative calm of a stalemated political situation and of an expanding economy, the constitutional revision deserves close scrutiny as a possible indicator of future developments. The new draft represents a radical departure from the I946 constitution. The latter, it will be recalled, was adopted at a time when the regime of Ho Chi Minh still operated on a coalition basis, with French troops and American observers still in Viet-Nam and the nearest major communist armed forces almost three thousand miles away. As this writer observed earlier

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