Addressing the two-day conference, Deputy Prime Minister-cum-Foreign Minister Pham Gia Khiem highlighted the urgent need to expand and improve externally-oriented information work in terms of both content and form.

Participants in the event outlined the duties and solutions in 2010, emphasizing better adherence to the related directive of the Party’s Central Secretariat. Accordingly, information campaigns on Vietnam’s seas and islands, including the country’s marine strategy, will be conducted effectively on schedule. They also stressed more efforts in the theoretical struggle against distortions by domestic and hostile forces.

In 2009, Vietnam’s relevant press and information agencies did good work promoting the land and people of Vietnam as well as development, and successfully refuted slanderous allegations from political opportunists, especially in the fields of democracy, human rights, religion, freedom of press, and territorial sovereignty.

They also helped to raise Vietnam’s status in 2009, when the country successfully defended its Universal Periodic Review on human rights at the United Nations.

The externally-oriented information work made progress in publicizing the results of the planting of border markers along the Vietnam-China border and the Vietnam-Cambodia border as well as the increase of markers on the Vietnam-Laos border, winning public support.