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Good
Governance Monitoring Report – Issue no. 1
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4. Palestinian Legislative Council
Performance
4.1 PLC General
Assemblies
The six-month period following the PLC elections
witnessed a steady decline in the ability of the PLC to function
normally. The ongoing political,
economic and social crisis has affected all aspects of government performance,
but the impact of the incarceration of more than 40 Parliamentarians,
including the Speaker and the Secretary, and certain Ministers by the Israeli
security forces is perhaps the most prominent and dramatic. Despite the challenging context, the PLC
continued to hold regular assembly sessions until the beginning of September
2006 whereupon a combination of factors, primarily the public employees’
strike and threats of violence, lead to the suspension of all PLC sessions. The following table shows attendance rates at PLC
sessions during the period under review:
The PLC continued to call the Prime Minister and
certain other Ministers to answer questions up until August 2006 - though no
formal enquiries or investigations were conducted. The following table summarizes the number
of questions posed in each session and the nature of the response from the
Executive branch.
Also, the budget committee of
the PLC submitted on August 22nd 2006 a report on the previous
government’s breaches of the organic budget law, especially with respect to
public debt. The main breaches highlighted were as follows: ·
Signing
of loan agreements by Ministers other than the Finance Minister. ·
Delays
in presenting loan agreements to the PLC for approval. ·
Failure
to notify the PLC of certain loan agreements. During the period under
review, the PLC took approximately 40 formal decisions. Of these 35% dealt
with issues of a legislative nature (mainly dismissing various Presidential
decrees); 25% dealt with regulating the work of the PLC and the committees,
10% were requests for action to be taken by the Executive branch; 10% dealt
with general public policy issues; 10% dealt with political issues; and, 10%
were condemnations of the Israeli occupation or US foreign policies. None of these PLC decisions dealt specifically
with administrative reform of the PLC but, after the formation of the PLC
Affairs Committee, some serious debate took place regarding internal
administrative reform. It was also agreed to review the development plan
prepared by the previous PLC in order to produce concrete recommendations for
future reform. 4.2 Permanent Committees
The new government made some
changes to the formation of PLC permanent committees as follows: ·
The
Education and Social Affairs Committee was divided into the following committees:
·
The
Interior, Security, and Local Government committee was replaced with:
·
Creation
of a separate Natural Resources Committee was created (as distinct from the
Economic Committee) ·
Creation
of a PLC Affairs Committee to deal with internal PLC administrative reform
issues. These changes make logical
sense as the scope of the pervious committees was too broad. The PLC permanent committees
continued to hold regular sessions until June 20th 2006 but, due
to various security and internal matters, have not held any sessions since
then. The activities of the committees were limited to preparing proposals
and reports rather than drafting and reviewing laws. The committees did not
deal with any legislation except for the following: ·
Approving
extension periods for submission of the PNA Budget Law 2006 and permitting
appropriations pro-rata based on the 2005 law. ·
A
law confirming a previous Presidential decree regarding the PLC election voting
dates for the police and the security officers. During the period under review, a total 14 draft
laws were submitted to relevant PLC permanent committees. The relevant
committees have not yet approved any of the draft laws. 4.3 Transparency of PLC Activities
While the
PLC continued to hold open sessions before the public, it failed to update
information provided on its web page.
The PLC did not publish any information on its achievements, laws
proposed or passed, decisions or any other activities. Citizens can, however, obtain information
about the PLC directly from PLC administrative staff members but there is
designated staff responsible for public communications. Published by Good
Governance Initiative - 2006 |