Many parliaments around the world are engaged in various forms of international cooperation—sharing experience and learning with other parliaments and the international community in an effort to strengthen their respective institutions.

A May 2015 report commissioned by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation shows that the number of organizations that provide support to parliaments has grown significantly during the past 15 years.  Parliamentary support helps elected officials and their staff fulfill the core functions of their jobs, including considering and adopting legislation, representing and engaging constituents, and overseeing the executive branch. 

Accompanying this growth in support to parliaments is an increasing recognition that effective parliamentary support programs should adhere to a common set of principles. The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), an international organization comprising 166 national parliaments, convened a five-member drafting committee to codify good practice and develop these common principles. In addition to the IPU, the drafting committee included NDI, the European Parliament, the United Nations Development Programme, and the French National Assembly.

The committee opened the draft document for comment to IPU member parliaments, and the draft principles subsequently underwent several rounds of validation with parliaments and their partners. The resulting Common Principles for Support to Parliaments were formally launched at the 132nd IPU Assembly in Hanoi, Vietnam on March 28-April 1, 2015.   Since its launch, the Common Principles have since been endorsed by more than 80 parliaments and international organizations.     

The document outlines nine principles on effective and efficient support to parliaments, guided by an overarching general principle that successful parliamentary development must be driven by the parliamentary institution. Recognizing that democratic parliaments are diverse institutions with members representing different constituencies and ideologies, the principles require that parliamentary support must be inclusive of all political tendencies.

The principles ensure that parliamentary support is gender-sensitive, transparent, and avoids potential conflicts of interest. For example, the principles provide that parliamentary support should not be used to advance commercial interests or be motivated by profit. The principles also aim to eliminate specific bad practices, such as organizations hiring talented staff away from the parliamentary institutions that they are otherwise working to support.

“The Common Principles for Support to Parliaments stress that support should be implemented with a nuanced understanding of the local political and social context, as well as grounded in emerging international democratic norms and standards for parliaments,” said Scott Hubli, NDI’s director of governance programs, who represented NDI throughout the drafting process. “In our world of rapid social and technological change, parliaments are facing an increasingly broad array of challenges; the Common Principles provide a framework for parliaments to share experiences with each other to better meet these challenges and serve the interests of the citizens they represent.”    

Since its inception, NDI has supported parliamentary development in more than 60 countries and remains committed to advancing excellence in the field of parliamentary development. Organizations that are interested in supporting the principles through formal endorsement are encouraged to send a letter of notification to the IPU Secretariat.  

Read the common principles here

Published on July 9, 2015