PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY - Inter-Parliamentary Union

An accessible parliament I 81
establishing a dialogue between the civil sphere and the National Assembly in
the legislative process.
The Parliament of Iceland has a twin-track approach, both inviting specific
submissions from relevant organisations and accepting them from individual
members of the public:
It is a standard procedure in the Althingi, the Iceland Parliament, that
the legislative standing committees ask for written opinions (submissions)
from those who are affected by the bills which the committees
are dealing with. In practical terms ‘those affected’ refers to interest
groups and similar non-governmental organisations and societies.
This reflects an established parliamentary opinion that those affected
by legislation have a democratic right to be heard and consulted.
Furthermore, any member of the public has a direct access to the
standing committees in the sense that everyone can send a written submission
to committees (either by letter or e-mail) regarding any bill
that the committees are dealing with. These ‘spontaneous’ submissions,
which are not formally requested by the committees unlike those
mentioned earlier, are all made available to committee members.
It should be added that all submissions to committees are available to
the public……and there are plans for making these documents available
to the public immediately after they have been tabled in the
relevant committee.
The Parliament of Moldova puts its most important draft laws on its website
in order to involve civil society in the debate:
For instance, this is exactly how the opinions and proposals of ordinary
citizens and of representatives of NGOs were requested in the
process of examination and final adoption of the Law on rights of the
persons belonging to national minorities and the legal status of their
organizations; the Law on the protection of consumers; the Law on the
approval of the Concept of national policy of the Republic of Moldova
and other laws.
Some issues of concern
The extracts reported above indicate some issues of frequent concern
relating to the involvement of civic organisations and NGOs in the legislative
process. One relates to how representative they are of a particular
constituency or social interest. A second concerns how independent and