World Conference of Speakers of Parliaments
By Anders B. Johnsson
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Leaders of the world’s parliaments met at UN Headquarters in New York from 7 to 9 September 2005 for the Second World Conference of Speakers of Parliaments, to bring their vision of multilateral cooperation to the hub of international politics. At the outset, the role of the institution of parliament is first and foremost a domestic one. These institutions are a diverse set, each zealously guarding its own independence and imbued with traditions, which in some cases date back more than a thousand years.
There is also a place for the leaders of parliaments in the UN General Assembly for various reasons. The first is a symbolic one. The Conference was held the week preceding the 2005 World Summit, with more than 150 Heads of State and Government attending. The presence of the speakers offered a timely reminder that democratic Governments are subject to the scrutiny of their parliaments and any decision of their leaders in the multilateral sphere will have to be debated in parliament if it is to be put into effect. Second, their presence in such a large number testified to a growing tendency within the international organizations to include parliaments in their affairs. At a time when the United Nations is in the throes of reform, the need for a more stringent democratic oversight of the work of multilateral organizations is being expressed more and more openly. Third and most importantly, it was a reflection of the changing agenda of the parliaments themselves.
The very first Conference of Speakers took place in 2000, on the eve of the Millennium Summit. Since then, the world has changed enormously. Tensions have been broken, often in very ugly forms. Across the board, there have been calls for more robust global governance, along with stronger democratic guarantees. Parliaments are directly concerned by these appeals. How should such intentions be translated into practical action? Not surprisingly, opinions differ. There are some who energetically champion a global parliamentary assembly, composed of parliamentarians initially delegated from their national assemblies and later directly elected, which would sit alongside the United Nations and scrutinize its affairs.
The view of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), convenor of the Conference, is more tempered. It makes little practical or political sense to set up a separate parliamentary assembly alongside the existing governmental General Assembly. The real priority is to ensure that there is better—i.e., closer, deeper, more systematic and sustained—cooperation between national parliaments and the United Nations in all its diversity. For this to happen, parliament members, whose work in parliamentary standing or select committees has given them expertise in specific international issues, must sit down with multilateral institutions to work out agreements. Only in this way would it be possible to introduce a useful measure of parliamentary scrutiny of the global institutions. It is here that the IPU must mobilize parliamentarians and make sure that this broader interaction with the United Nations takes place. The speakers declared that the time had come for a strategic partnership between the IPU and the United Nations.
Aside from the formal debate, other events were held. One panel debated on the specific issue of parliaments and their relations with the United Nations, which helped to flesh out some ideas that were put forward in the plenary; another looked at parliaments and democracy, focussing on the degree to which parliaments efficiently fulfilled their role as guardians of democracy and studied the IPU project to establish a set of good practices, drawn from existing parliamentary procedures worldwide.
The Second Conference also provided an opportunity to take stock of progress made since the 2000 Conference, when the speakers called upon all parliaments and the IPU to “provide a parliamentary dimension to international cooperation”. They stated that “parliaments embody the sovereignty of the people and can in all legitimacy contribute to expressing the will of the State internationally”. To what extent have they been turned into practical reality? A detailed report on “parliamentary involvement in international affairs” attempted to find the answer. Two aspects were particularly striking: the sheer energy that parliaments put into a huge variety of international activities, and the absence of a unifying factor streamlining the work towards a single goal.
The speakers need the IPU to act as the channel between the United Nations and the world’s parliaments. This channel, they said, must be a fluid, efficient two-way connection, in which the huge knowledge-base offered by the United Nations could be shared with those elected to represent the people, while their day-to-day hopes and grievances could be conveyed in all their force to the United Nations. |
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Anders B. Johnsson has been Secretary-General of the IPU since July 1998. Prior to this, he served as Deputy, directing the development of successful activities to promote and strengthen parliamentary democracy. Mr. Johnsson is an expert on international law and organization, refugee law and human rights, as well as parliamentary diplomacy and cooperation. |
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