Now that the OpeningParliament community has launched the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, the focus of activity is shifting to using it as a tool for advocacy at the country level. More specifically, organizations are seeking to answer the question: how can the Declaration can be used not only to support “open parliaments” for the sake of openness, but also to support the higher level goal of more responsive, accountable and democratic parliaments?

Obviously, the Declaration is only one of many advocacy tools, but it can hopefully serve as a useful roadmap for the world’s parliaments on what a truly open, democratic parliament should look like. It can also help stimulate a global conversation around parliamentary openness between the OpeningParliament community and parliaments. Perhaps most importantly, as John Wonderlich from the Sunlight Foundation put it, the Declaration can help to “validate the work” of parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs) worldwide – so that when a PMO seeks to engage the Speaker of Parliament in a particular country, they are doing so not just as an individual NGO or as a group of individual activists, but also a part of a reputable international movement.

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Here’s some news from the last two weeks:

In Ireland, the PMO KildareStreet, which has been without data since September 18 because of the Irish Parliament (Houses of the Oireachtas) ceasing to publish XML data, has started a fundraising campaign to raise money to support a redevelopment of their website that will allow them to independently scrape parliamentary data. Click here to support KildareStreet’s resurrection.

In Africa, a regional network of PMOs met for the first time in Accra, Ghana, in September after first coming together at the PMO conference in Washington in April/May. One participant, the Institute for Empirical Research in Political Economy in Benin, wrote a short post about the event. The conference was led by the Ghana Center for Democratic Development and allowed for discussions on the formal creation of an African network, creating a study that maps existing PMOs in Sub Saharan Africa, and the use of the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. Participants from Kenya, Uganda and Malawi, among others, were also involved. (It’d be great to hear a report from any members here who attended!)

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Some housekeeping items: 

1. Comment on the Declaration has officially closed (although that’s not to say we’re no longer listening to your input), and we will begin preparing it for publication and release on September 15 at the World e-Parliaments Conference in Rome. We hope to have this process completed within about one week so that we can make the final document available for translation into multiple languages (if you are interested in translating, please let us know). Keep checking this email list and OpeningParliament.org for more information as that process moves forward.
2. We have started to post the logos and websites of participating organizations at OpeningParliament.org/Organizations. If you don’t see your organization there, send me an email with your logo!
3. In just the past week, I’ve learned about organizations doing parliamentary monitoring work in Ukraine, Bulgaria and Benin. We’ll be working to get these organizations involved in this network, and I just wanted to encourage everyone who reads these emails to notify us if you know of other organizations doing this type of work around the world that might not be on our radar.

Onto some news:

In Mexico, an editorial appeared in La Silla Rota, a well-known online publication, about the efforts of this PMO network to draft the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. It explains the importance of an international Declaration in the context of Mexico’s parliament, citing gaps in Mexico’s adherence to the provisions in the document and calling for more openness. The article also mentions OpeningParliament.org and the recent conference in Paris. (English translation)

A newly formed PMO in Ukraine, Chesno (“honest”), launched a new website to monitor deputies in the Ukrainian Parliament. The tool reports on MPs attendance records, income declarations, votes, political promises, and corruption. Check out articles on the new website in TechPresident and the Kyiv Post.

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