News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Croatia, a new freedom of information law has been adopted. The law outlines the types of information that must be made public and calls for proactive publishing of this data by government agencies and bodies. GONG, a Croatian parliamentary monitoring organization, provided input and amendments to the law during its drafting, which were adopted.

In Botswana, the Botswana Speaks Parliamentary Initiative was recently launched with the help of Gov2u and other partners. The initiative, similar to the USpeak platform in Uganda, intends to improve governance and bring more voices into the policy-making discussion by connecting MPs directly with citizens through SMS messaging.

In Mexico, Fundar continues to work with MPs who are interested in redesigning the parliament’s website in order to make it more responsive to citizens. MPs cite the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency’s index and the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness as guides for this work. MPs held a Legislative Dialogues for a Digital Mexico meeting with activists, civil society organizations, and scholars calling for the creation of a new federal agency that would address a growing digital divide, work towards universal access to information, and drive Mexico’s broad digital agenda.

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I will be out of the office next week at the Democratic National Convention (a shameless plug: follow my Twitter feed at @DanSwislow for updates), so we’ll be skipping next week’s news update email. Luckily, there’s a lot of news for you to read this week! As always, please share your own.

Colombia‘s Congreso Visible has won the Luis Carlos Galán Medal for their fight against corruption in Congress, given by the Colombian Congress’ Joint Board of Ethics Committees.

In India, PRS Legislative Research released a number of reports about the Indian Parliament’s lack of productivity, garnering news coverage by the BBC, Hindustan Times and the Financial Express, among others. The research shows both houses of the Indian Parliament sitting and debating bills far less than in previous years, and a rise in the number of disruptions. The 15th Lok Sabha is being called the “most disrupted House ever.” PRS also released a report on the number of days that state assemblies are seated per year.

In Pakistan, PILDAT, a parliamentary monitoring and support organization and member of this community, facilitated an initiative to bring together MPs from both India and Pakistan for a fourth round of dialogues. This is a pretty remarkable example of a PMO working cooperatively with parliaments to strengthen their work, especially in light of the tensions between India and Pakistan. Read about the dialogues in The Nation, Business Recorder and Gulf News.

In Uganda, the Uganda National NGO Forum launched its citizens assessment of the 9th Parliament, the Parliament Watch Bulletin. The report was undertaken in consultation with citizens, civil society and MPs, and collected data through interviews, questionnaires and media reports. It includes an analysis of parliament on issues like performance, oversight, anti-corruption. The report was featured in a television story by NTV, and detailed in numerous print media outlets, including Newvision, UG Pulse and Daily Monitor. The bulletin also addressed the issue of MP attendance.

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As usual, some housekeeping: 

• I hope some of you have had the chance to review the final Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. You can also view a regularly updated list of supporting organizations here: there are now 73 PMOs from 53 countries (plus the EU and Latin America, regionally) who have participated in the development of or indicated support for the declaration.
• We’re currently working on a cover design and would like to incorporate translations of the title from multiple languages – if you have a minute, please send us the translation of “Declaration on Parliamentary Openness” into your native language.
• Pedro Markun from Transparencia Hacker in Brazil sent out a survey for global PMOs on technology. This survey will aim to help the community to assess what kind of technological needs exist in PMOs around the world as well as where organizations may have strengths. The ultimate goal here will be to create a ‘tech support group’ to aid fledgling PMOs who need help building websites, website components, or just making technological choices. Please fill out that survey here. Once we have some good data, we’ll work with Pedro to publish the results to you.

Onto some news:

The Argentinian PMO Directorio Legislativo launched their seventh legislative directory entitled, Legislative Directory: Who are our legislators and how do they represent us?. The directory contains a survey of national legislators as well as information on 8 provincial legislatures. The launch of the directory took place at the Argentine Senate and was widely covered by the press. The event included a reform-minded Senator calling for the enactment of a law on access to information.

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If anyone has their own news to share, please send it along, but here are a few stories that may be of interest:

I would highly recommend taking a look at this blog post from Oxfam. It takes a look at eight case studies of campaigns on access to information, budget transparency, and government accountability from different countries around the world, and draws conclusions about what types of strategies work best for advocacy. The case studies are from the International Budget Partnership, and explore stories in Mexico, India (2), South Africa (2) Argentina, Pakistan, and Tanzania. 

In South Africa, an article appeared in the Mail and Guardian detailing the importance of an open parliament to democracy and improved quality of life, highlighting the issues of public participation, consultation and accountability of MPs. The article appears in the context of the People’s Power, People’s Parliament conference, which begins today in Cape Town and lasts until August 15, hosted by, among others, PMO Network member Parliamentary Monitoring Group. We look forward to hearing about the results of the event. Speaking of PMG, an academic paper was released recently that details and analyzes civil society participation in the South African Parliament, using a significant amount of data and information from PMG. Furthering the topic of last month’s conference in Paris, this is yet another example of PMO work informing and enhancing academic research—and vice versa.

Click here to read more.