PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY - Inter-Parliamentary Union

74 I PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
These can not only save time and money on paper and postage costs, but
facilitate new ‘outreach opportunities’ for initiating communication with
different groups of electors interested in particular issues.
As for correspondents, the report makes some recommendations which
apply equally to surface mail users. Email to a member of Congress will have
greatest impact when it is:
■ from a constituent, with a name and full address;
■ in the constituent’s own words, not copied from a form letter or website;
■ from an individual, not an intermediary organisation;
■ regarding a single issue, not a group of unrelated issues;
■ in an easy to read format, with a clear purpose stated in the first paragraph.
Empowering citizens
to seek redress
An important function for parliaments is to provide a framework through
which citizens can raise grievances and have them investigated. The traditional
channel for members of the public to raise a complaint about public
authorities or seek redress has been through their elected representative. The
importance of the constituency office in this context has already been noted.
An elected member typically has more clout when taking up a case with a
government body or public authority than a private individual does on their
own. Parliaments have also traditionally allowed a more general access to
complainants through the right of petition and through petitions committees.
This right dates back to the very origin of parliaments, as a recent NDI publication
on Parliamentary Human Rights Bodies reminds us:
The right to petition is at least as old as the institution of parliament
itself. It has even been argued that the Parliament in the United
Kingdom originated in meetings of the King’s Council where petitions
were considered. In France, the right to petition parliament for redress
of grievances has existed almost permanently since the French
Revolution. With the increase in the influence and importance of
parliaments, petitioning parliament became one of the main methods of
airing grievances, so that parliaments had to set up special committees
to cope with the ever increasing number of petitions. These committees
can be considered as the first ‘human rights’ committees as their aim
was and still is to redress injustice. (Ingeborg Schwarz, Parliamentary
Human Rights Mechanisms, NDI, 2004)