Ideas for amendments and good practices in the parliamentary regulations

In Monday – 27th of May, 2013 the newly formed Parliament of Bulgaria organized a meeting with representatives of the Bulgarian NGOs in order to exchange ideas about what changes and amendments should be implemented in the regulation of the National assembly.

We are presenting you the ideas and good practices, proposed on the meeting by the Institute for Public Environment Development.

1 – Transparency and providing of complete, timely and accurate information about the activities of the parliament:

• There should be available data of the voting of MPs, of their absences from plenary sessions and committees; Information about the declarations that MPs have to fill, reports and other materials for the parliamentary work should be stored in a structured way and open format, thus meeting the standards for “open data”, suitable for automatic reuse (XML format). The parliament should reduce the use of PDF formats for the information that it stores, and should also try to limit the publications of handwritten documents (declarations, etc.) on its website.
• The meetings of the parliamentary committees, subcommittees and of the working groups should be broadcasted online, through the website of the Parliament in order to provide real-time visibility of  the positions, defended by policy makers and stakeholders. There should also be an archive to support the records of these meetings.

2 – Accountability and proactive publication of information:

• The outcomes of the activity of those committees and working groups – reports, analyzes, opinions etc. – should be published in the correspondent section of the parliamentary website, dedicated to the work of those structures.
• The parliamentary website should publish all of the reviewed and approved parliament reports – for example: Report of the Court of Auditors, the Ombudsman, the Commission for Protection of the Personal Data, and all other structures, required by law to report to the parliament.
• The National Center for Public Opinion Research (NCIOM) should maintain an electronic webpage