Parliament urged to become more transparent

A group of 36 nongovernmental organizations issued an appeal urging Parliament to provide more information to the public about its work, Info-Prim Neo reports. The signatories noted that, despite a positive dynamic, Parliament continues to remain behind in ensuring transparency of the decision-making process and informing the public on its everyday activity. The appeal recalls that ensuring transparency and information of the public is a basic obligations of elected officials towards the voters and a way to increase public confidence in the institution of Parliament, noting that lately the level of trust plummeted to its lowest in the last decade – 13.6% in November 2011, according to the Public Opinion Barometer. In particular, the signatory organizations are requesting Parliament to start publishing on its website www.parlament.md, from 1 February 2012, all the protocols of the public meetings of the Parliament's Standing Bureau, of the permanent, special and investigatory Parliamentary Commissions. Parliament is also asked to post audio recordings from its plenary meetings and an archive of minutes of public meetings since 1990. Further, Parliament should display all the statements on incomes and assets of all the MPs and of the Parliament's Secretariat staff since 2009, as well as the CVs and contact information for all the MPs. The signatories note that this information is not classified and their publishing should not entail great costs since they are supposed to already exist in the Parliament's archives in electronic form. Moreover, their publishing will be a further demonstration that Parliament respects the rights of the voters and of ordinary citizens.