E/CN.4/1995/31/Add.4 page 19 recent law on the press, where the advances are partly offset by the continued need for prior authorization to publish. Similarly, the development of associative activities is in practice not closely enough linked with current relaxation policy. IV. CONCLUSIONS 63. The Working Group noted with interest the new policies embodied in the new 1992 Constitution. 64. However, it was of the view that there was a widening gap between the rapid modernization of the economic system and the delay in acting on the new Constitution’s guidelines on fundamental freedoms. 65. In this regard, the Working Group is concerned at the lack of progress in lifting de facto or de jure restrictions on freedom of opinion in all its forms, both individual and collective. The Commission will remember that, according to its methods of work, the Working Group is called upon to assess the relationship between detention and the peaceful exercise of the freedom of opinion, expression, assembly or association (cases of detention meeting the criteria of category II, see "Method of Work", E/CN.4/1992/20, annex I). 66. From another standpoint, the Working Group stresses, as the Human Rights Committee has already done (A/45/40, para. 492), the importance of developing associative activities; the Committee goes on to say that associations play a primordial role in informing the population of its rights. 67. Here, the Working Group is thinking not only of non-governmental human rights organizations, but also of those whose purpose might be to help users or consumers to become aware of their rights or to alert the public to the importance of protecting the environment. 68. Without such counterbalances, the booming market economy could work against the general interest. 69. With regard to the visit itself, the Working Group considers it essential, in discharging its mandate, to visit pretrial detention centres, since its main concern is the period of detention preceding trial. From experience, visits to re-education camps alone, where most prisoners were serving very long sentences, created a sort of time-lag since, in order to assess the legality of the detention, the delegation needed to look into the conditions and circumstances in which a given individual was arrested, or placed in custody or pre-trial detention many years earlier, sometimes more than 10 or 15 years. 70. Another observation: persons convicted of other than ordinary crimes appear to fall into two categories, one might almost say two "generations": (a) Firstly, those serving very long sentences (one of the prisoners interviewed was in his seventeenth year of imprisonment) for offences linked with the aftermath of the fall of Saigon; as many of them had conducted secret armed-resistance operations on the instructions of their military commanders,