Open Government Partnership Global Summit

OGP open parliament action plans are being developed to strengthen transparency of the legislative process and increase the involvement of citizens. The session ‘Open Parliament Action Plans- from Idea to Implementation’ will discuss the experiences of civil society and parliaments of Chile, France, Georgia and Mexico in developing, implementing and monitoring these plans. The objective of this session is to learn from each other’s experiences and spark interest to initiate additional open parliament action plans within OGP.

Moderated by the co-chairs of the Legislative Openness Working Group and hosted by the President of the Senate of Mexico, Sen. Roberto Gil Zuarth, this high-level session will allow parliamentary leadership from around the globe to share information about experiences and challenges in implementing commitments to parliamentary openness. This session will also explore solutions for how OGP can deepen engagement the legislative branch.

Reinforcing collaboration as one of the main values of the OGP initiative, some countries have seen the development of formal alliances between parliament, civil society and other stakeholders to build consensus around openness reforms. In this session, MPs and civil society representatives will share their experiences from their countries about working together towards parliamentary openness, providing different models for replication in other countries.

Numerous actors in civil society and in the parliamentary community have drafted and adopted standards related to parliamentary transparency, including the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness and the Santiago Declaration. A number of new standards documents—on issues like parliamentary ethics and codes of conduct and lobbying—are being launched at the end of 2015. This session will discuss how these standards frameworks fit together and how they can be used to advance parliamentary openness and support the Open Government Partnership. These standards were an element of this year’s Global Legislative Openness Week (GLOW) campaign, which ran from September 7-September 15, 2015, coordinated by the Legislative Openness Working Group.

This session will foster dialogue and the exchange of innovative practices toward legislative openness, as well as the institutional challenges to achieve open parliaments. The OAS and ParlAmericas have led work on parliamentary openness in the region of the Americas, through collaborative initiatives, such as the Santiago Declaration; the first and second Inter-American Meetings of Presidents of Legislatures, Parliamentary Forums and Integration Parliaments; the Parliamentary Gathering on Legislative Transparency held on the margins of the VII Summit of the Americas; and the working group on Open Parliament at ParlAmericas' 11th Plenary Assembly. This session will make available members of parliament from five countries, inviting engagement and interaction with Latin American civil society representatives in the audience.