PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY - Inter-Parliamentary Union

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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.”
176 I PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY One problem also noted is the duplication and overlapping between different regional parliamentary organisations. An Andean legislature, for example, could be a member of the Andean Pact Parliament, of the Latin American Parliament and of the Inter-American Parliamentary Assembly. A parliament of the Maghreb, for example, could be a member of the Consultative Council of the Maghreb Union, the Arab Inter-Parliamentary Union, the African Parliamentary Union, the Francophone Parliamentary Assembly and the Pan-African Parliament. The report notes that “most parliaments indicate the priority they give to working with certain parliamentary organizations”, though few have taken steps to coordinate their inter-parliamentary relations as, for example, the Italian Chamber of Deputies has. One common feature of regional inter-parliamentary assemblies is the aim to foster greater integration and legislative coordination between member countries. A specific example of a regional parliamentary initiative to help promote democracy is provided by an IPU working group member from the ASEAN region, Loretta Rosales: A recent breakthrough in the ASEAN region is the coming together of like-minded members of ASEAN Parliaments towards the unconditional release of Aung Sang Suu Kyi and the full restoration of democratic rule in Burma. Equipped by our individual legislative resolutions on the matter, MPs from Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia and exiled MPs from Burma met in Kuala Lumpur in 2004 to forge unity in convincing our governments to reject Burma’s chairmanship of ASEAN in 2006, unless compliance to its commitment to restore democratic rule and release political prisoners headed by Suu Kyi is undertaken. The regular meetings of the ASEAN Inter-parliamentary Myanmar Caucus (AIPMC) and our continued dialogues with our respective Ministers, ASEAN Ministerial meetings and individual Heads of State have helped in a major way to press Burma’s final decision to withdraw her chairmanship of the ASEAN Ministerial Conference. Technical assistance Technical assistance is best described as the action of institutions or persons to help build capacities in a parliament, especially parliaments in developing countries and emerging democracies, in order to enable them to perform their functions more effectively. Technical assistance was born of
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consideration of a bill more effect
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