The conference was attended by MPs and representatives of the National Assembly Support Service, representatives of international organisations, civil society organisations and the media.

Addressing the participants of the conference, National Assembly Deputy Speaker Gordana Comic stressed that parliamentary transparency means transparency within the parliament itself, following procedure, openness toward the expert public and the citizens. The MPs’ integrity is crucial for the National Assembly’s openness toward the public, and the citizens in particular, because they alone stand between the executive and the citizens, opined Gordana Comic.

Director of the Centre for Research, Transparency and Accountability (CRTA) Vukosava Crnjanski said that the National Assembly had made progress as regards its openness toward the citizens. What had greatly contributed to it was the fact that the National Assembly adopted the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, drafted by more than 150 civil society organisations from all over the world involved in parliamentary transparency, and also endorsed and adopted by the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, said Crnjanski.

The results yielded by the Index of Parliamentary Transparency regional research, based on the criteria set out in the Declaration, were used to prepare recommendations on how to improve the openness of the parliaments in the region. CRTA representative Jovana Djurbabic presented the methodology and results of the research conducted in October 2014 on the parliaments of Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Albania. The research was conducted by direct insight into the official parliamentary websites and analysis of documents, and it covered there categories: promotion of the culture of openness, transparency of information relating to parliamentary work and access to information on parliamentary work. The CRTA representative said that the results show that the parliaments in the region had achieved progress in their openness to the public, especially focusing on the results concerning the National Assembly. The recommendation for the National Assembly, as well as the other parliaments in the region, is that the relationship between the parliament and civil society organisations should be institutionalised, and more detailed information and document from the sittings of the parliamentary working bodies should be made available.

The conference also touched on the possible models of cooperation between the National Assembly and civil society organisations. Zoran Gavrilovic, representative of the Bureau for Social Research (BIRODI), listed the results of the consultative meetings CRTA and BIRODI had with more than 60 civil society organisations in Serbia. Generally speaking, civil society organisations are interested in cooperating with the parliament, and the best cooperation model would be via the assembly committees within the parliament’s control role.

The experiences and models of cooperation between civil society organisations and the parliaments of Croatia and Montenegro were represented by Marina Skrabalo of the Croatian organisation GONG and Dragan Koprivica of the Montenegrin organisation Centre for Democratic Transition.