Monitoring Report of Parliamentary activity during the legislative session of September - December 2009

This monitoring report is mainly based on statistical data available on the websites of the Romanian Parliament and completed with information provided by both Chambers to the IPP’s FOIA request. The report continues the series that IPP initiated in 2007 by publishing such monitoring reports at the end of each parliamentary session. This report covers the session September - December 2009.

The statistical information related to all MPs was analyzed and processed in the light of the following aspects:

1.    presence at the vote in plenary of each MP (is available a ranking made by IPP);

2.    the work of the standing committees in the Chamber of Deputies and Senate;

3.    the number of legislative initiatives submitted by each senator and deputy in relation to their effectiveness ;

4.    speaking in Parliament, policy statements and legislative initiatives submitted by MPs in the monitored period;

5.    number of interpellations/number of questions addressed by the MPs to the Government.

The actual analysis of parliamentary activity of the current legislative session September - December 2009 was directly influenced by the presidential election. All the MPs were involved in one way or another into the presidential elections which obviously affected the normal operation regime of the Parliament.

Compared to the previous reports of the Institute for Public Policy (IPP), the present analysis lies under the auspices of significant changes in the structure and role of the Romanian Parliament, as a result of the referendum in November last year. According to IPP, these changes - as ways to streamline the parliamentary work - should not be solely viewed in terms of giving up one of the two rooms of the Parliament, but still lead to genuine public debate on a number of issues arising from parliamentary activities which seem not to work in conditions of normality.

As regards the monitoring of the activities of both Chambers of the Permanent Office, we find a significant setback in comparison with the last legislature. Transcripts of meetings of the Permanent Bureau were published with very large delay after meetings, so that certain topics of discussions were already outdated when they were made available to those interested. The Chamber of Deputies has given up the practice of publication the map of the meetings which contained all documents - a mechanism considered by IPP extremely professional and transparent in the past.

Therefore, we present a number of conclusions regarding the categories of information monitored in terms of individual activities of the MPs.

·         Activities of the steering committees

IPP presented for the first time situations of the activities in the steering committees such as: number of meetings, presence of the MPs, the main registered documents, etc. Summarizing the available information on the work of standing committees of the Chamber of Deputies, we can say that the most active committees in term of number of meetings, reports made to the draft law are: the Committee for Legal Matters, Discipline, and Immunities  (32 sessions, 49 reports, 204 opinions), the Committee on Economic Policy Reform and Privatization (34 sessions, 11 reports, 11 opinions) and the Committee on research abuses, corruption and petitions (34 meetings). Regulation Committee had just one meeting during this legislative session.

At the Senate the most active committees are: the Committee for Public Administration Territorial Planning and Ecological Balance (24 sessions, 62 of 67 reports and opinions), the Committee on Budget (20 sessions, 33 of 42 reports and opinions) and the Foreign Policy Committee (12 meetings, 5 reports, 18 opinions).

IPP maintains that, for efficiency and accountability in terms of standing committees’ activity, they should have separate access management, separate sections concerning their work in the websites of both Chambers. In this regard, staff's standing committees should directly bear the responsibility for the publication of all categories of information necessary to give the exact size of the committee's work (minutes of the meeting, the nominal current situation and the individual votes on each parliamentary reports and advice, details of bills debated, etc.) in a uniform and transparent manner, both at the Chamber of Deputies and at the Senate. According to some of the presidents of the committees, they strictly keep records of the presence at the work of committees in order to evaluate the monthly allowance of the MPs, but this information is not currently published. Therefore, we cannot address the natural question whether, indeed, MPs who were absent from the work committees were subject to corresponding reductions in compensation at the end of month. As a general comment, although the Chamber of Deputies has made investments in video equipment for some of the standing committees, they are actually not used for the purposes that the IPP originally intuited - namely to professionalize and make transparent the work in committee - but was rather a check mark for media.

·         Presence at work

IPP note that the ranking lawmakers in plenary presence of the two Chambers have appeared new names in comparison to the last legislature; most of them are MPs on the first term. Compared with the last session, the attendance at plenary and the committees sessions has improved in relative terms, but updating the information regarding this topic is still weak in committees (only some of the standing committees published in the site this type of information). Further well-known politicians, leaders of political parties, registered massive absences from work (the case of the deputy Viorel Hrebenciuc it is eloquent as he has no presence in this session in the plenary vote). Another category of MPs, Ministers, who are motivated by the law but they were not able to participate at the vote to represent the interest of the citizens. In this respect, IPP made the proposal that these two functions may not be compatible.

We present below the first/last position of the top of the presence for both Chambers. Please find in Annex 1 the entire tops.

Chamber of Deputy

Senate

As a main conclusion, the presence in the Senate was lower than the presence in the Chamber of Deputies. In general, the Presidents of Committees were absent from work. In this respect, IPP draws attention to the fact that over half of them were absent from work in plenary, in this session. The leaders of the groups were absent, vast majority of them failing to be present at 50% of the work in Parliament.

·         Legislative initiatives

As the Parliament represents the legislative institution of the democratic state, IPP was interested in evaluating the legislative initiatives of the Romanian MPs. Since the previous reports, this evaluation of the number of legislative initiatives was combined with an indicator of "efficiency", that will reflect not only the actual number of parliamentary initiatives, but also the number of those initiatives that became laws during the term. Thus, we consider that a realistic assessment of efficiency can be achieved at the end of the mandate of each MP. Hereinafter, some MPs initiated, in one year of mandate, more than 100 law projects such as Mircia Girgiu, PDL but there were also deputies with no initiative during this period such as Gabriel Oprea, Independent. In the Senate, Emilian Francu, PNL initiated 57 legislative projects and Iulian Urban, PDL, 51.

·         Political Statements and Interpellations

According to IPP, the Romanian Parliament is not seen as a forum for genuine discussion, where the leaders of parliamentary parties use this power to give genuine debate on issues of real interest. In this respect, the situation of political statements in the Parliament and additionally, the fact that most of them belong to MPs who are not necessarily in a superior function did not give sufficient consideration to the mechanism of the exercise of the mandate.   

IPP was concerned with the acquisition of a series of issues regarding the Democrat-Liberal Party (PDL). Specifically, lawmakers PDL continued to be present in the charts of the most prolific parliamentarians who addressed interpellations to their own ministries. Such aspect was apparently inexplicable. The Institute appreciates that such actions demonstrated the lack of ongoing dialogue between state institutions and especially, amongst politicians belonging to the same political party. Moreover, it reiterated the proposal of introducing wider mechanisms of debate for the parliamentarians representing simultaneously both the same political party and the Government.

As a first general conclusion, despite the statements made by the leadership of both Chambers, there was no significant improvement, in this legislative session, regarding the citizens' access to information related to the parliamentary work. The situation of access to information regarding the legislative process continues to be critical in the Senate, where there is actually no primary information on the website.

None of the Chambers published, in a consistent and uniform manner, information related to the work of parliamentary committees, although these coordinated the main part of the legislative process and held substantive discussions on draft laws. In some cases – especially in the standing committees in the Senate - it was impossible for an interested citizen to track even the agenda of meetings of one committee, since this type of information was not published on the Commission’s website section. Without this information, it was impossible to follow the work of the standing committees and hence, the likelihood of genuine debate or legitimate attempts of influencing the decision-making process was minimal.

Summarizing the main points monitored during the current report, the Institute for Public Policy will continue to carry out this work in the next legislative sessions, aiming to advance in the public debate a number of important issues linked to the reform of Parliament and of the parliamentary term. Also, IPP will make, in the next period, thematic monitoring/evaluations of the parliamentary work, only in this way, being able to talk about a genuine democratic control exercised by civil society over the state institutions in Romania.