PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY - Inter-Parliamentary Union

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An effective parliament (II): Parliament’s involvement in international affairs I 179 also implemented a similar project to assist the fledgling Parliament of Timor Leste. In the United States, in 2005 the House of Representatives set up a Democracy Assistance Commission (HDAC), to enable House Members, their staff and Congressional support agencies to direct assistance to their parliamentary counterparts in newly democratising countries. Because the constitutional separation of powers prohibits the legislative branch from administering a foreign aid programme, the HDAC concentrates on providing technical assistance on a member-to-member or staff-to-staff basis. The scheme is supporting assistance to up to five countries across different regions in 2006, selected after on-site assessment visits. In addition, the authorising resolution enables the HDAC to recommend to USAID that material assistance be provided to a parliament when it identifies a need. The preliminary report of a working group set up by the Conference of the Speakers of the EU Parliaments to survey assistance to parliaments of new and emerging democracies indicates that the sum of 511,000 Euros was allocated in June 2005 by the German Federal Government to provide assistance to four parliaments in the form of financial support for the procurement of office equipment, and the supply of specialist texts for parliamentary libraries. The same report refers to the project the German Bundestag is implementing in partnership with the University of Berlin and which brings some 100 young people from 21 countries to Berlin to undergo training in parliamentary work in the office of a German Member of Parliament. Concluding remarks As we have seen, there is a democracy gap in international relations that needs to be filled by involving parliaments in global and regional affairs in a more effective way. At the global level, parliaments must work with intergovernmental organisations or negotiating fora in which States, acting on an equal footing, reach agreements that must be implemented in each member State. At the regional level, parliaments have to adapt to the new circumstances resulting from the transfer of some of the State’s sovereignty to a new regional entity, which is not the case at the global level. Yet, different though they are, the actions parliamentarians have to undertake to bridge the democracy gap in both scenarios are surprisingly similar. They have to be firmly rooted in their own parliament and taken at the national
180 I PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY level. In both instances, meticulous oversight of governments is called for. There needs to be a clear legal basis for parliamentary involvement. Parliaments need to be informed sufficiently in advance of government policies and negotiating positions and receive accurate information about the policies and their background. They need to have adequate organisation and resources to address the issues, including sufficient expertise among the parliamentarians involved, through a specialised committee or committees. There must be an opportunity to put questions to ministers and negotiators in the light of which parliamentarians must be able to express their political (though not necessarily legally binding) views to the government. Finally, members of parliament should also be included as a matter of course in governmental delegations to international organisations. These efforts at the national level need to be complemented by international involvement, for example through the kind of international and regional parliamentary cooperation we have outlined in section three of this chapter. With regard to international affairs, this approach has been validated by two recent global conferences of Speakers of parliaments, which both expressed the view that the best way of bridging the democracy gap at the international level is by using existing parliamentary organisations and assemblies which have been legitimised by democratic election at the national level and not creating any new structures. And the appropriate coordinating instrument within international organisations for these bodies is the IPU, as the world organisation of parliaments. In particular, following the granting to the IPU of permanent observer status at the United Nations in 2002, the Speakers consider it the most appropriate body to provide a strong and democratic parliamentary component to the United Nations. An additional merit of the IPU approach is that it provides a clear way of advancing the dual strategy for overcoming the democracy deficit in international policy: through more effective parliamentary oversight at the national level, on the one hand, and through involvement in existing international parliamentary organisations and assemblies, on the other. It will be parliamentarians with clear domestic democratic legitimacy who will be involved at both levels. Those involved will typically have expertise and an abiding interest in the issues at stake because they handle the same issues in the parliamentary committees at home. This approach was most recently endorsed in the Declaration of the Second Conference of Speakers of Parliaments held in New York in September 2005:
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consideration of a bill more effect
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