PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY - Inter-Parliamentary Union

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An effective parliament (II): Parliament’s involvement in international affairs I 161 Committee are drawn up by the Human Rights Unit within the Ministry of the Attorney-General for the preparation of reports required under international instruments. The Unit is assisted by a Human Rights Committee, which comprises representatives of the 13 government ministries and one representative of parliament. Upon the completion of the report, the Attorney-General tables it before Parliament. A special sitting on the CEDAW Committee’s concluding comments took place at the Swedish Parliament in April 2002. It brought together parliamentarians, NGOs and the Chair of the CEDAW Committee. Like in the area of human rights, a growing number of parliaments are also establishing special committees or other bodies to address gender equality issues and/or giving a specific gender equality mandate to existing parliamentary committees. The French parliament, for example, has created delegations for the rights of women and equal opportunity for men and women. The area of gender equality offers yet another example of the international engagement of parliamentarians that is replicated in other areas as well. Every year, the IPU organises a parliamentary meeting at United Nations Headquarters in New York on the occasion of the meeting of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. The meeting offers an opportunity for men and women legislators who work on gender equality issues to exchange experiences, debate issues on the United Nations agenda and draw up strategies for national implementation. Development The issue of parliamentary involvement is particularly pressing in relation to the fulfilment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These constitute an ambitious programme to which the international community has committed itself, the aim of which is to achieve a wide range of goals by 2015: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and empower women, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensure environmental sustainability, and develop a global partnership for development, with targets for aid, trade and debt relief. Addressing development issues in parliament requires parliamentarians to be familiar with human rights. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights suggested in 2001 that countries adopt a rights-based approach to development. Draft Guidelines were developed and are available to parliaments to help in preparing development strategies and fighting to eradicate
162 I PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY poverty (Draft guidelines: A human rights approach to poverty reduction strategies, 2002. ). This approach has the merit of departing from the notion of development as charity and defining its objectives in terms of legally enforceable rights. A key mechanism for the achievement of the MDGs in the seventy or so poorest countries is the programme for national poverty reduction which goes under the name of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). These are the framework documents negotiated between governments and the World Bank and IMF which provide the basis for debt relief and concessionary financing. As a UNDP-NDI handbook on the PRSPs notes: The PRSP is often the largest and most comprehensive economic policy plan that any single government or parliament will need to manage. Because it is so comprehensive and typically requires the passage of enabling legislation and relevant appropriations, a fruitful PRSP process revolves around the smooth exchange of information between the executive and legislative branches. (Legislative-executive communication on poverty reduction strategies, 2004) However, even though the process involves international decisions with enormous impact on domestic policy, parliaments have been left on the sidelines so far. Although the World Bank has insisted from the outset that the PRSPs should be ‘country owned’, the in-country consultations and the negotiations with the international financial institutions have so far largely bypassed parliaments, as the World Bank has itself acknowledged. Parliamentary involvement has typically been limited to formal ratification of the PRSPs, and to monitoring the financial aspects of their implementation through the budget process. Even here, budgetary scrutiny of donor funds is often taken over by the donors themselves. In response to concerns about the limited role of parliaments in the first phase of the PRSP programme, the World Bank has published its Parliamentarians Guide to the World Bank (revised edition 2005). In actual fact, there are some examples of more extensive involvement: ■ In Mauritania, parliamentarians were members of the PRSP working groups and the committee monitoring the PRSP process. Parliamentarians held a debate with NGOs and other civil society and development partners before approving the PRSP. ■ In Honduras and Nicaragua, individual members of parliament played important and active roles during the consultation process for the PRSP.
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■ a public record available on li
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case in Switzerland, the country wi
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types of, 8, 15-17, 69 voter partic
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Myanmar, 176 Namibia, 77, 110 Natio
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Sweden, 63, 75, 110, 112, 165 gende
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PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY - Inter-Parliamentary Union

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