Actions Plan for the implementation of the Declaration of parliament openness has been developed by Ukrainian organizations monitoring parliamentary activity (OPORA, CHESNO, Transparency International Ukraine, Eidos, the Institute of MediaLaw) jointly with Verkhovna Rada, with support of UNDP in Ukraine. The plan includes 20 commitments between parliament and civil society in the following areas: 1) access to information; 2) the involvement of citizens into parliamentary processes; 3) reporting; 4) technologies and innovations.
Nowadays the project "Open parliament" involves people’s deputies, representatives of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukrainian and international public organizations.
Coordinator of the public network "OPORA" Olga Aivazovska presented preliminary figures of legislative activity of Verkhovna Rada for the period of year and a half and spoke about the public tools to monitor parliament, in particular, she presented Portal of open data of Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine developed by OPORA, staff of Verkhovna Rada with the assistance of Developing Program of UNO in Ukraine. This web resource, which in structured form contains more than 110 basic sets of public data on legislation, draft laws, plenary sessions, people’s deputies of Ukraine and others. "Based on these data, you can create analytical products and web tools that provide information about the work of parliament in the most accessible form," - said the speaker.
OPORA’s analyst Anatolii Bondarchuk in his speech presented the performances of efficiency and transparency of parliamentary committees, in particular, he stressed that deputies of all fractions without exception develop more laws not for the committees to which they belong, but for other committees.
Leader of the OPORA project Olena Rybii presented the first results of monitoring of 105 majoritarian deputies, on the ground of which monthly ratings of deputies’ indicators of legislative activity and a work directly in the election districts were obtained. In addition, she showed the All-Ukrainian map of reception contacts of 198 majoritarian deputies and parliamentary parties which is intended to activate the relation of citizens with people’s deputies and representatives of the parliamentary parties in the region.
According to the chairman of the "Laboratory for Legislative Initiatives" Ihor Kohut, the joint work of people’s deputies, public organizations, the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada, parliament office and other state institutions in the first three months of hard work of an initiative "Open parliament", allowed achieved a lot in relation to the implementation of sometimes quite challenging while very important decisions for the greater openness of the parliament and convenient access to information of common public.
Reference: "Open Parliament" is an international initiative coordinated by the working group on legislative transparency, which in the framework of the "Partnership" Open Government" works over the spread of best practice of openness of the parliamentary processes. The activity of the working group is based on the Declaration of openness of the parliament. The previous Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Volodymyr Groisman signed an Order on approving the Actions Plan of the Declaration of openness of the parliament. The main objective of the project is to ensure greater transparency of the parliament work and involve into parliamentary processes citizens.