Posts tagged "Declaration"
Posted January 26, 2015 at 12:28pm by
Today, the Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy in the United Kingdom launched their final report detailing recommendations on how parliamentary democracy should respond to the opportunities and challenges presented by technology.
Among its conclusions, the Commission recommended the formal adoption of the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness by the House of Commons.
Read the full report here, and watch a video foreword for the report below:
Posted September 18, 2014 at 12:44pm by
This post originally appeared on the Sunlight Foundation’s blog.
Sunlight is thrilled to mark Global Legislative Openness Week with our global legislative transparency campaign, which culminated earlier this week in a joint letter from the world’s parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs) sent to national legislatures across the globe. The letter calls for increased legislative transparency and parliamentary open data, and affirms the importance of legislative institutions and NGOs as partners in strengthening democracy. It is also an invitation for increased collaboration, offering help to legislatures in embracing new technology. In the short time since we solicited endorsements, we’ve been nothing short of astounded by the response we’ve gotten from the community of PMOs throughout the world. In part, that’s due to the unique strength of the PMO network we’ve built along with the National Democratic Institute and the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency; it also demonstrates NGOs’ appetite for both transparency and for coordinated international advocacy. One hundred nine PMOs from 54 countries have endorsed the letter, along with a variety of other supporting organizations.1 The letter has also been translated into 14 languages, for a total of 20 translations (including regional variations). With groups’ help from around the world, we have submitted the letter to 191 legislative bodies in 130 different countries and the EU.
Read the full letter that calls on legislatures across the globe to make parliamentary data “open by default.” Many legislatures are demonstrating an eagerness to respond. Our colleagues at Hasadna in Israel have leveraged the campaign to begin conversations with the Knesset about releasing an API for parliamentary data. The Al Hayat Center in Jordan had a personal appointment with the Speaker of the Jordanian parliament to hand deliver our community’s demands for openness. These early conversations mark a new opportunity for dialogue between PMOs and members of parliaments, and we expect to hear of many more examples in the coming weeks. In addition to these governmental responses, we’re also seeing a big response from our broader PMO community. National level actors are customizing the campaign to leverage it in their own context, through activities including organizing a coalition of civil society organizations (CSOs) for a strong coordinated promotional push (Spain, Burkina Faso, Croatia), crowdsourcing unique translations based on the national parliamentary situations or cultural nuances (Latin America, Netherlands, Chile) and even hand delivering letters to parliaments when contact information is difficult to find (Kenya). One development we’re particularly excited about is that our approach to legislative reform at scale internationally is also being translated to the subnational level. Sunlight is leading (and will soon be sending) a similar letter to every U.S. state legislature, and PATTIRO — an NGO based in Indonesia — has disseminated the letter nationwide, reaching out to the country’s 34 regional legislatures. OpenNorth, a PMO in Canada, and Public Policies Lab from Argentina have also sent the letter to local legislatures. We expect that these stories of direct legislature impact and national CSO activity are just a few of the many to come. To track these initiatives, we’ve put together a public document to help build a repository of success stories for the global legislative transparency community. However, to create a complete and inclusive repository, we need your help. If you know of any updates or activities that have resulted from this campaign on the national level, please add it to our spreadsheet. 1 “Supporting” groups include parliamentary bodies or commissions within parliaments that are publicly supporting the initiative by promoting the letter or the message behind the campaign.
Posted September 15, 2014 at 11:43am by
Today, September 15, is the International Day of Democracy and the beginning of the Global Legislative Openness Week (GLOW), sponsored by the Legislative Openness Working Group of the Open Government Partnership.
Get Involved!
For ideas on how you can support the campaign for greater parliamentary openness during the GLOW, click here.
Don’t forget to Follow all of the action on Twitter using the hashtag #openparl2014 and tell us, why is an open parliament (or legislature, congress, council or assembly) important for your democracy?
You can check out a calendar of some of the events that are happening around the world during the GLOW at www.openparl2014.org.
To start us off, the Legislative Openness Working Group is convening a regional meeting of MPs, legislative staff and civil society organizations from 15 countries at the Parliament of Montenegro in Podgorica today and tomorrow (view an agenda for that meeting here).
Today also marks the launch of a global advocacy campaign during the GLOW, Open Up Your Legislature!, led by the Sunlight Foundation. The campaign calls on the world’s parliaments to make legislative data “open by default.” More than 100 organizations from the OpeningParliament.org community have signed onto a letter in support of the initiative over the last two weeks, which will be sent to parliamentary leadership around the globe. The letter has been translated into twelve languages so far, available here.
The Declaration on Parliamentary Openness is launched in Rome on September 15, 2012.
Lastly, today we’re also celebrating the two-year anniversary of the launch of the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, which more than 150 civil society organizations from over 80 countries have signed onto so far. Has yours? Read more about the launch at the 2012 World e-Parliament Conference here.
Posted September 1, 2014 at 6:05am by
In July, the Organization of American States (OAS) convened an Inter-American Meeting of Presidents of Legislative Powers at the National Congress of Peru. The event brought together parliamentary leadership from more than 25 countries in the Americas, and highlighted issues of parliamentary openness and accountability as a major topic of discussion.
The meeting culminated in the endorsement of the Lima Declaration (view it in English or Spanish), which ratified the recommendations of two working tables at the event, including one entitled, Transparency and Accountability in the Role of Parliament: Are there any Open Parliaments?
This working table, one of two highlighted during the event, agreed to a number of principles including the promotion of greater civil society engagement in the legislative process, initiatives for civic education, and the integration of new technologies. Among its specific agreements, it endorsed the civil society-authored Declaration on Parliamentary Openness as a fundamental standard for legislative openness.
Parliamentary leadership from more than 25 countries convene in the Congress of Peru.
The working table also recognized the work of the Open Government Partnership’s Legislative Openness Working Group (OGP-LOWG) as well as additional key international standards documents like the Santiago Declaration on Transparency and Integrity in Parliaments and Political Parties. (View all of the working table’s agreements in English and Spanish.)
In addition to the working tables, conference participants also had the chance to hear from experts on parliamentary openness and citizen engagement, including Senator Hernán Larraín, representing the Chilean Congress as co-chair of the OGP-LOWG; Cristiano Ferri, director of the e-Democracy project and HackerLab at the Chamber of Deputies of Brazil; and others including Senator Pío García-Escudero Márquez, president of the Senate of Spain.
Read more information on the conference on the OAS’s website.
Posted May 15, 2014 at 12:37am by
An international consensus on standards for democratic parliaments has only recently begun to emerge over the last decade. As one component of these standards, the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness provides a useful framework for both CSOs and parliaments to assess legislative information management practices and other aspects of legislative openness. While members of parliament (MPs) who adopt resolutions to support the Declaration’s principles take the important step of shifting their parliament towards a culture of openness, citizens are able to utilize the Declaration to raise awareness and advocate for greater transparency on specific issues.
There are several recent examples of parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs) using the Declaration’s principles as benchmarks to evaluate their respective parliaments. This strategy benefits from the legitimacy that an internationally endorsed set of standards lends to national advocacy efforts. Moreover, with every new analysis that’s framed using the Declaration, PMOs increase the growing body of comparative information available on parliamentary transparency and encourage others to undertake further analyses.
In Portugal, the PMO Transparência Hackday is the latest to provide an analysis of a national parliament using principles from the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness as benchmarks. Transparência’s research looks at the Declaration’s 44 principles in light of Portugal’s parliamentary practices, records whether each principle is complied with or not, and provides additional explanation and links to where this information can be found.
Transparencia Hackday analyzes the Portuguese Parliament based on the provisions of the Declaration.
The simplicity and reproducibility of this analysis are notable. The resulting series of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ responses to the availability of specific information quickly draws attention to those aspects of information access where parliaments can improve and areas where they are succeeding and may offer positive examples to other parliaments. This approach also benefits from its objective frame: the resulting analysis is like a series of check marks, the accuracy of which can be maintained by crowdsourcing additional information (for instance, Transparência Hackday welcomes others to provide feedback on their analysis directly on their wiki).
Posted November 18, 2013 at 11:16am by
News from the OpeningParliament.org community:
In Spain, Qué hacen los diputados released an analysis of the parliamentary website, using the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness as a base point. Qué hacen los diputados continued their series on forms of citizen participation in politics by looking at basic institutional norms of Spain’s Autonomous Communities. Fundación Ciudadana Civio reported that the new Quién Manda? platform already has 2,500 profiles and 3,200 verified relationships. Civio also published guidelines for republishing their content and projects, stating, “All of our articles are re-publishable. We do not compete with media. We want you to use our information.”
In Romania, the Institute for Public Policy called for public debate on the future of an MPs Code of Conduct, citing concerns that the current draft of the code does not take into account the perspective of civil society. The Ratiu Center for Democracy highlighted Roma activist Dr. Angela Koczi as the recipient of the Ion Ratiu Democracy Award by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
In Argentina, El Estadista published an article by the director of CIPPEC’s Local Development Program on how e-governance can help improve citizen participation. Directorio Legislativo conducted a series of interviews via Twitter with candidates from different provinces and parties in the lead up to legislative elections. The Executive Director of Directorio Legislativo wrote a guest post for the Sunlight Foundation blog, discussing the decade of struggle it took for Argentina’s Congress to publish the declarations of assets and conflicts of interests of its members.
Posted September 12, 2013 at 8:30am by
Last week, nearly 1,000 delegates and observers from Commonwealth parliaments came together in Johannesburg, South Africa at the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA)’s 59th Annual Conference. The CPA counts more than 17,000 parliamentarians as members from 175 national and sub-national parliaments in 54 countries around the world.
The conference included a workshop entitled, “Governing Democratically in a Tech-Empowered World: Deepening Partnerships Between Parliaments and Parliamentary Monitoring Organisations.” Members of parliament from four countries led a panel discussion, including Hon. Dr. Pambos Papageorgiou (Cyprus), Hon. Dr. Benjamin Kunbour (Ghana), Hon. Junaid Anwar (Pakistan) and Hon. Dave Levac (Ontario, Canada), along with K. Scott Hubli, director of governance programs at the National Democratic Institute.
