HÀ NỘI — Thousands of exasperated citizens have been forced to travel to the capital Ha Noi over the past five years to get a fair answer to their complaints as local officials fail to do so, a meeting heard on Thursday.

The meeting, organised by the Ministry of Justice, the Central Committee of the Việt Nam Fatherland Front and the Government Inspection (GI), aimed to review the efficiency of complaint handling at local level and revealed that the Central Citizen Reception Centre in Hà Nội had received more than 21,259 complaints for the last five years.

The centre, the go-to place for citizens when their complaints are not resolved in their hometowns, served more than 72,601 citizens, including 2,023 mass groups.

More than 70 per cent of the complaints were delivered to the GI.

Government Inspector General Lê Minh Khái said though the number of complaints filed to the central level had fallen since 2015, the cases were bigger and growing more complicated.

“Complainers in mass groups were getting more extreme, and in some serious cases, threatened or offended the ombudsmen (at the centre) and security forces,” he said.

The Central Committee of the Việt Nam Fatherland Front chairman Trần Thanh Mẫn said there were 187 inspections carried out at localities by central-level complaint handling bodies in the last five years.

They citizen reception work at several localities was performed for appearances only. The role of the head of the local citizen reception body was also often not performed well.

Khái suggested all central complaint handling bodies join forces to carry out inspections in the near future to cover a wider range of localities.

“Take the Thủ Thiêm case in HCM City for example. It was not resolved for more than 20 years until the Prime Minister asked the GI to inspect and report on the case in two months,” he said.

“If in the past we could have had sent inspectors to examine whether the complaints were handled properly or whether citizen reception work was done well, the case would surely have been resolved much more quickly.”

The miserable livelihoods of more than 100 households who were driven out of their home in Thủ Thiêm to save land for the construction of a new urban area shocked the nation this summer when reports of their 20-year-long journey to file complaints spread on the media.

PM Nguyễn Xuân Phúc ordered an inspection following intense public pressure on the case, and a GI report in September found the local government had committed several serious violations in land management. — VNS