PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY - Inter-Parliamentary Union

An effective parliament (II): Parliament’s involvement in international affairs I 175
Of course, parliamentary diplomacy need not be conducted exclusively
between parliamentarians. It can also entail members of parliament visiting a
country for meetings with authorities and entities to consult in solving
conflicts and problems. Thus, for example, Members of the South African
Parliament have shared their experience in conflict situations and reconciliation
in several countries in the Middle East region.
Inter-parliamentary cooperation
The multiplication of inter-parliamentary exchanges in one form or the
other over the past decade has been extraordinary. A provisional attempt
to map them has been made by Stelios Stavridis in a working paper of
November 2002, Parliamentary diplomacy: some preliminary findings
and by the IPU, which keeps a
record of formal and informal structures for inter-parliamentary cooperation.
In view of the dynamic expansion of parliamentary diplomacy, only a few
examples will be treated here, more to illustrate their variety rather than
attempt to be exhaustive.
All parliaments engage in bilateral cooperation of some kind. Most
parliaments have developed bilateral friendship groups which promote cooperation
between the parliaments and countries concerned. There are literally
thousands of these friendship groups in existence today.
To these should be added an ever growing number of informal networks of
parliamentarians who meet to work on specific issues. Some address development
and population issues, others deal with disarmament issues, while others
still discuss the issue of small arms, etc. Parliamentarians for Global Action
(PGA) addresses a cluster of issues and has recently managed a successful
campaign to mobilise support for the International Criminal Court.
There are also many formal parliamentary structures. One of the first was
the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, a parliamentary forum that
brings together the parliaments in the countries of the Commonwealth. Its
French-speaking counterpart is the Francophone Parliamentary Assembly.
There is a host of regional and subregional parliamentary assemblies. The
IPU report Parliamentary Involvement in International Affairs notes that the
survey responses from parliaments “clearly indicate an intensification of
parliamentary participation in regional inter-parliamentary structures.
Throughout the world the trend is clearly discernable: more and more parliaments
dedicate time and resources to regional parliamentary cooperation.”