The decision by the European Parliament’s Bureau to put “all data” regarding attendance of MEPs in plenary and committee meetings was timed perfectly, coinciding with the closure of independant web resource How MEPs Work which fulfilled the same function until financial problems forced its closure.
Visiting the How MEPs Work site at time of writing returns the message “Project offline”.
The report, put forward by Italian MEP Marco Cappato of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, aims to make information on attendance available to the public through the Parliament’s website before the 2009 election.
Cappato’s report said that, “Accessing information relating to the EU institutions still remains an obstacle-strewn path for ordinary citizens, due to the lack of an effective citizen-oriented inter-institutional policy of transparency and communication.”
Marco Cappato
An article on Schuman Square suggests The European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee may not not have passed the measure with such a majority had they read the fine print closely.
In addition to the attendance figures mentioned in the Euractiv article, Shuman Square reports that disclosure “Would include their participation in roll call votes,” and would be “Searchable by the MEP’s name, plenary, committee, delegation, vote, day or term.”
Reading the report I notice it also calls for information to be made available on MEPs allowances, spending and financial interests, and for National Parliaments and elected bodies to be invited to do the same “by establishing a Register of parliaments’ and parliamentarians’ activities”.
This is an opportunity to throw some light on the inner workings of the EU, on the activities of MEPs and go some way towards encouraging transparancy in member states. Cappato is right, there can be no real Democracy without transparancy. If this measure makes it through the Plenary it can only improve the credibility of MEPs and the European Parliament, much as the excellent They Work for You has for MPs in Britain.
The idea has its critics, Euractiv quoted Statewatch Editor Tony Bunyan’s response:
“Under the Commission’s proposal, only the final document would be a “document”. All the draft proposal documents would not be ‘documents’, which means that all the changes, options, discussions would be secret and hidden from public view and scrutiny. The lifeblood of a democracy is the ability of parliaments, civil society and citizens to know what is being discussed and to make their views known before the final ‘document’ is set in stone.”
Mr. Bunyan is right to point out the shortcomings, but in practice the majority of voters will only dig so deep. A list of final votes should be fit for purpose in the run up to the June election, after which further transparancy can be sought. Cappato makes this aim clear in the report, which states, “The EU institutions should now take further steps towards greater transparency, openness and democracy by moving towards an “EU Freedom of Information Act”.
The move was welcomed by London’s Green Party MEP Jean Lambert who said that generally attendance was a good sign of engagement.
“I’m willing to bet,” she said, “That when that info comes out there will be people who hardly ever set foot in the place.”
Discussing the usefullness of attendance figures in measuring an MEP’s engagement James Stevens posted the following on Jon Worth’s blog.
(7 votes, average: 3.57 out of 5)
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Cool! Are there any statistics compiled as of yet? I’d be curious to see how Romanian MEPs have been doing; back home they are not very hard-working, but in Bxl they don’t get their paycheck if they don’t sign the timesheets. Despite the fact of low attendance rates in the national parliament in Romania (and statistics being widely discussed in the media) the people voted oftentimes for the same guys - although we had a uninominal vote for the first time, allowing us to vote for individuals and not for party lists.
I think that all the statistics went down with the “How MEPs Work” site.
The website for the IPP, the Romanian Think Tank who ran the site which was based on a comparable site for Romanian parliamentarians, also seems to have gone down. I emailed the person in charge of “How MEPs Work” on Saturday but as yet they haven’t gotten back to me.
I’d be interested to know what’s happeneing, where the funding gap is coming from. Maybe the EU pulled the plug because they’re going to supply the info themselves. Maybe the Romanian gov got sick of funding it…?
People get so disillusioned - they just vote for the same bunch of criminals saying “Hey, they’re politicians, of course they’re corrupt.”
I don’t think it has to be that way.
No, no, no… the IPP stats never made the headlines. There was this Romanian blogger (working for Google in NY actually) - http://www.vivi.ro/blog/ who, backed up by all online publications (and later on by print ones) and by bloggers, that got the data from the website of the Romanian Senate and Chamber of deputies (they are public, in a primitive format so to say) and played with them a bit. In the end he created the so-called “Harta Politicii” (The Map of Politics) that was a total hit in the blogosphere and also in other media forms - http://www.vivi.ro/politica/ People still got elected in the Parliament in the end sometimes after a vote redistribution. But nonetheless, it shows that a bit of personal citizen responsability (and some brains, of course) always does the trick.
Wow - just shows you what can be done. Inspiring really.