News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Montenegro, the Center for Democratic Transitions (CDT) was selected as one of the four winners of the UNDP competition “Technology for Citizen Engagement.” The award provides small grants to support ideas for using technology to expand opportunities for citizen engagement. CDT’s  winning idea was Ask for Data, a tool that will allow citizens to easily request information from public institutions.

In Kenya, Muslims for Human Rights released a video raising awareness about the right to know how MPs are spending constituency development funds. The constituency development fund, which is intended to support development projects in MPs’ constituencies, lacks meaningful oversight.

In Greece, Vouliwatch recently released its first annual report, highlighting the role of digital technology in allowing citizens to follow parliamentary issues, ask questions to MPs, and to share ideas and proposals. The organization also announced that it will begin to provide information about the activities, discussions, and decisions of the European Parliament related to Greece and other key policy issues.

In Pakistan, Pakistan Institute for Legislative Development and Transparency (PILDAT) released two scorecards measuring the quality of governance at the federal and provincial levels of government.   

In Chile, Chile Transparente released a report on the transparency of political parties. The report concludes that although there was overall improvement compared to previous years, political parties still have weak programmatic and financial transparency.

In Georgia, Jumpstart Georgia’s Gender Pay Game was selected as a finalist for the Data Journalism Awards 2015. Winners will be announced during the Data Journalism Awards Ceremony at the General Editors Network Summit in Barcelona on June 18.

In Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda, and Nigeria, Open Knowledge and Code for Africa announced the 2015 cohort of Open Government Fellows. The new fellows will promote increased government transparency and improved dialogue between citizens and governments.

In Europe, more than 100 groups issued a letter to urge the European Commission to make the lobby register legally binding. The letter also calls on the Commission to ban meetings with unregistered lobbyists and to allocate appropriate resources for monitoring and enforcement of this rule.

In Kuwait, Kuwait Transparency Society celebrated its 10th Anniversary.

In Mexico, the Senate, in cooperation with the National Democratic Institute, hosted a three day workshop on Promoting Legislative Transparency. The training covered several tools and methodologies to improve civil society’s capacity to use data to monitor parliamentary activities.  

Click here to read more.

Latin American legislatures have significant work to do to meet international standards on openness and transparency.  This is evident from the latest findings of the Latin American Index for Legislative Transparency, unveiled between 15-25 September during Global Legislative Openness Week (GLOW) in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. The average country score was below 40 percent. While Peru (55%) and Chile (53%) lead the index, Argentina (36%) ranks in seventh place, followed by Bolivia (24%) and Venezuela (21%).

What does the Index measure?

The Index comprises four dimensions: (i) Legal regulations; (ii) Parliamentary work; (iii) Budget and Administrative Management; and (iv) Mechanisms for Participation, Public Engagement and Accountability.

Click here to read more.

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.

This post was written by NDI Colombia staff member Jheison Romain.

Greater public access to legislative information is a key requirement for allowing citizens to hold their governments accountable. Opaque legislatures that limit the information they release prevent citizens from making informed decisions and diminish the public’s ability to hold their elected officials accountable for their actions. Legislative transparency is a key challenge facing many governments around the world, especially in Latin America. Argentina, in particular, has one of the lowest indexes of legislative transparency in the region, according to recent comparative studies conducted by the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency (LALT).

Photo credit: Red Innovación

To support efforts to address this issue, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), through Red Innovación—a virtual online Spanish-language forum where social and political innovators from throughout the region can highlight initiatives, solicit feedback and harvest new ideas to help governments become more responsive, transparent and effective—recently collaborated with Argentine civil society organization Directorio Legislativo to conduct activities promoting greater transparency within the Argentine Congress. Directorio Legislativo hosted a meeting with members of congress from several political parties in April to discuss issues in parliamentary openness and tools for increasing transparency. During the meeting, participants decided to launch a working group on legislative transparency to advance transparency issues in both chambers of Congress.

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In India, a recent news article covered PRS Legislative Research’s organizational model. PRS Legislative Research recently published a report on the activities of the Lok Sabha, joined the debate on pending corruption bills, and explored parliamentary and constitutional issues of new statutory entitlement legislation. Elsewhere in India, the government launched an Accountability Initiative to provide resources for accountable governance and procurement. TechPresident covered CGNet Swara, a project aiming to empower citizens to address their problems using voice messaging. The Times of India detailed the lack of transparency in political donations. 

In Spain, OpenKratio became the 130th organization to endorse the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. OpenKratio supports a number of open government initiatives, including the Hummingbird Project, which aims to bridge the programmer/web journalist communities with the Spanish Congress to facilitate data access. Recently, OpenKratio announced a collaboration with the Andalucia Open Left political party and reported on a study on big data and political participation. A new app where users can express their opinion on current legislation is now available. Elsewhere, Global Integrity highlighted a “low-tech” approach to improving transparency in rural areas of Spain by Graba tu Pleno.

In Mexico, legislators in the Chamber of Deputies sought to change the content of transparency reforms in a way that civil society organizations said would be a major step back for government openness. Amid this vast criticism, legislators rolled back these changes at the last minute before passing the reforms through the Chamber late in the evening, September 22. Further commentary is available from Fundar here.

Click here to read more.

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Germany, Parliament Watch described efforts to get candidates to sign a transparency pledge ahead of the September elections. Parliament Watch also recently worked with their media partner Der Spiegel to create an interactive election website for citizens to guess the outcomes of upcoming elections. Elsewhere, the German branch of the Open Knowledge Foundation visited the Code for America offices in San Francisco to begin the “Code for All” international partnership. A monthly report of all OKF Germany’s July activities is available here.

In Peru, the Congress faced a battery of criticism over appointments to a number of key posts in the country, with President Ollanta Humala calling on some of the new appointees to step down. Entorno Parlamentario suggested four areas of reform (and Transparencia Peru a further three), while La Republica criticized the ethics committee for lack of sanctioning members who receive formal complaints.

In Afghanistan, the Free & Fair Elections Forum (FEFA) released their June 2013 parliamentary monitoring report, which highlighted a number of positive developments, including on the activities of the Oversight Committee on Performance of the Government and the Committee on Women’s Affairs.

In Argentina, a new voting record tracking app, the winner of an April 2013 hackathon won seed funding to further develop and scale. An interview with the team is available and the source code is available on GitHub.

Click here to read more.

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

The European Public Sector Information Platform published a report on parliamentary informatics, including how organizations can support parliaments in open data initiatives. Report author Karolis Granickas from TI Lithuania recently discussed the report and other topics on the OpeningParliament blog.

In France, Regards Citoyens updated the citizen open data catalogue at Nosdonnes.fr. The organization proposed an amendment to increase MP voting transparency, offered 10 proposals to increase transparency in light of a fraud scandal in the Minister of the Budget’s office, and weighed in on the debate over new lobbying rules in the National Assembly.

In Argentina, the legislature of the city of Buenos Aires endorsed the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. A video from the legislature is available here.

In South Africa, the Parliamentary Monitoring Group (PMG) published a case study entitled “Getting Information to the People: The Role of the Parliamentary Monitoring Group.” The report includes a description of PMG’s mission and activities, brief sections on what challenges and opportunities face PMOs around the world, and suggestions for future activities.

Click here to read more.