Setting the Price, Seizing the Land: Five Problems with Việt Nam’s Draft Land Law

Few major bills have moved at the breakneck speed of the proposed amendments to Việt Nam’s Land Law. [1] This pace is especially striking given that hundreds of thousands of households are losing their land and homes to major “development” projects across the country.

“It’s too fast; It’s too rushed,” was the anguished response of residents in Gia Bình commune as the state expropriated land for the Gia Bình Airport project. [2] That exact sentiment also describes the process of amending the Land Law.

Added to the National Assembly’s legislative agenda only on June 26, the draft policy documents were published by July 21. Lawmakers are already expected to consider the bill at a session this August. If passed at the October session, lawmakers will have drafted and enacted one of Việt Nam’s most consequential laws in under four months.

Moving quickly does not necessarily produce bad legislation, but caution is essential for a law that directly affects the property, homes, and livelihoods of millions. Caution does not mean delaying necessary reform; rather, it prevents reforms from creating long-lasting injustices that could take society years to remedy.

So, what exactly deserves scrutiny in this draft Land Law?

1. Many Amendments Would Alter the Legal Balance in Land Expropriation

The draft Land Law introduces two primary categories of amendments.

The first addresses organizational and technical changes necessary to resolve bottlenecks from the restructuring of local government. This includes simplifying administrative procedures, codifying existing mechanisms, and redistributing authority under the two-tier local government model.

The second, however, requires particularly careful scrutiny because it alters the legal balance between the state and the citizens whose land the state is expropriating.

In land expropriation cases, the state determines the purpose of the taking, issues the decision, administers compensation, sets the price, and enforces the outcome. Residents do not enter into this relationship voluntarily or on equal terms. Hence, the procedures the state must follow are not just administrative formalities to be rushed; they are safeguards against the abuse of power and vital protections for displaced residents.

Troublingly, the current draft tends to strip these procedural safeguards and checkpoints from the law, replacing them with broad, policy-oriented provisions. It simultaneously expands decentralization, leaving critical details entirely up to the government or local authorities to determine.

2. Removing Procedures Could Give Authorities Greater Discretion

The current 2024 Land Law sets out relatively detailed safeguards that the state must satisfy before it may expropriate land. [3]

For example, Clause 3 of Article 80 says that expropriation can only happen after a compensation and resettlement plan has been approved and the actual resettlement arrangements have been made. 

Article 87 also outlines the specific procedures for drafting and posting these plans, consulting residents, holding dialogues, arranging resettlement, and finally issuing the decision. 

Reinforcing this, Clause 6, Article 91, reiterates that resettlement must be finalized prior to any expropriation ruling, while Article 94 sets payment deadlines and financial penalties for delayed compensation.

By contrast, Clause 3, Article 35 of the draft Land Law states only that land expropriation may be decided according to the progress of a project or of compensation, assistance, and resettlement. [4]

Article 38 of the draft condenses this entire process into just six broad task groups. The approval of the compensation plan is now grouped with the issuance of the expropriation decision, while expropriation, compensation, resettlement, and enforcement are lumped together into another category.

In effect, the draft fails to identify which steps are legal prerequisites, their proper sequence, or the penalties for agencies that act out of order. 

A legally defined procedure dictates that steps occur sequentially, with one serving as the condition for the next. By merely listing task groups without defining their chronological order or deadlines, Article 38 removes these vital conditions.

This change could grant expropriating authorities excessive discretion, thereby weakening the legal foundation for residents to file grievances or for courts to review the legality of expropriation orders.

3. Việt Nam Could Have 34 Different “Mini” Administrative Systems

While the draft Land Law removes many binding processes and procedures, it authorizes provincial-level people’s committees to establish the administrative procedures necessary to exercise the land-related powers assigned under Article 17. As a result, Việt Nam could end up with 63 entirely different sets of land administration procedures across its 63 provinces and cities.

Decentralization is not inherently flawed, but a problem arises when the law fails to establish minimum nationwide protections. If each locality creates a different process to govern the exact same property right, a resident’s legal protection will arbitrarily depend on where their land is located.

Although the government has the authority to issue implementing regulations, the National Assembly must clearly define the limits of that delegated power. 

Core issues—such as the conditions for expropriation, deadlines for compensation, requirements for compulsory enforcement, citizens’ participation rights, and the legal consequences of procedural violations—must be codified directly through legislation. Because these issues restrict property rights, housing rights, and livelihoods, they should never be determined solely by government decrees or local administrative decisions.

Furthermore, uneven implementation capacity remains another concern. The Communist Party and state leaders have already acknowledged that decentralization has not always been matched with accountability, resources, data, or qualified personnel.

Against this backdrop, granting implementing authorities more discretion while removing procedural constraints is a high-risk gamble. Decentralization without oversight is not reform; it merely disperses the risk of abuse to the local level. 

Hence, every provision should be tested against a simple question: If applied in the way most harmful to residents, would the law still provide a mechanism strong enough to prevent or remedy that harm? 

If not, the provision is unsafe to pass.

4. Conflict of Interest and Pricing Monopoly in the State’s Land Expropriation

Việt Nam’s 2013 Constitution establishes the principle that land belongs to the entire people. How land is valued, what data is used, and how the process is supervised are questions of institutional design. 

If the state sets land prices, the underlying data must be complete and the valuation method must be explainable. Furthermore, the valuation process must be relatively independent of the expropriating authority, accompanied by a meaningful judicial mechanism to review the results.

A central conflict of interest arises because the state decides to expropriate land, sets the price, and then may earn substantial revenue by reallocating or auctioning it.

Because of this, using a single land-price schedule for two fundamentally different objectives is problematic. Việt Nam requires two separate schedules. 

The first would determine financial obligations for land directly used in production and business. These obligations should remain low and stable, and any adjustment to the land price of an operating project should not exceed 5% at a time. 

The second schedule would determine compensation for expropriated land. This must guarantee replacement value, ensuring that affected people can obtain equivalent property, housing, or means of production. This schedule must be updated regularly, and if payment is delayed, compensation should be adjusted to reflect changes in land prices or replacement costs.

Any system where the party seeking the land exerts decisive influence over the amount paid to the displaced person contains an inherent conflict of interest. To resolve this issue, the valuation process must remain independent of both the expropriating authority and the project developer. Việt Nam needs a public land-price database, professional valuation organizations, and a mechanism for independent valuation assessments in legal proceedings.

5. Is Financial Compensation Enough?

When a family’s land is expropriated, they lose more than a physical space measured in square meters; they risk losing jobs, customer bases, community networks, educational opportunities, and public services.

As a result, the standard for evaluating expropriation policy should not be whether the authorities merely paid an amount listed on a land-price schedule. Instead, the focus must shift from compensating for lost property to restoring overall living conditions. The true measure of success is whether people’s livelihoods are genuinely equal to or better than they were before the expropriation.

This standard also serves as a test of whether the interests of the state, residents, and businesses are balanced. If a development project generates enormous land value for the state or an investor while displaced residents are pushed to the margins, left impoverished, and forced to fight for their compensation, the benefits have not been distributed fairly.

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Ultimately, national development should not oppose people’s rights. A true state governed by the rule of law achieves development not by weakening those rights, but by ensuring that the power of land expropriation serves proper purposes, operates transparently, and remains subject to meaningful oversight.

While cutting procedures might allow a project to advance several months sooner, they cannot be considered effective governance if the result is hundreds or thousands of households losing their homes and livelihoods or spending years mired in complaints and lawsuits.

The effectiveness of a land law should never be measured by how quickly a site is cleared. Rather, it must be judged by its capacity to constrain state power and prevent the disputes and injustices that inevitably follow land expropriation.

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C.B. is a legal expert in Việt Nam. The author uses a pseudonym for safety reasons. This article was written in Vietnamese and published in Luật Khoa Magazine on August 5, 2026. The Vietnamese Magazine translated it into English.