PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY - Inter-Parliamentary Union

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: