The Parliament of Montenegro din not increase the transparency of the work of the working bodies, as it is not possible to have their direct transmission or lists of votes of individual MPs at working bodies’ sessions.
This is stated in the analysis of the openness of parliaments’ work in the region by the Center for Democratic Transition (CDT) in cooperation with partners from the ActionSEE Regional Network.
The Parliament of Montenegro, for the fourth consecutive year, is the most open in the region. It currently complies with 81% of the openness indicators.
Research shows that the Parliament publishes basic data on its work, but budgetary transparency has not been improved.
There has been no progress either in direct communication with citizens.
Facebook and Twitter accounts of the Parliament still do not exist, there are no possibilities for citizens to directly draw attention of their elected representatives to the negative phenomena in society and demand a quick response from them.
MPs must have intensive contact with the citizens and listen to their needs, rather than point them to slow and complicated procedures. The only thing left are quite backward procedures for the citizens having to raise 6000 signatures if they want to draw the attention of the people they have chosen.
The legislative activity of the Parliament has not been improved by increasing the capacity to assess the possible impact of legal solutions during their preparation.
It is also necessary to promote the publication of the budget and the final account on the website. Moreover, the budget documents were not published in open data format. The Parliament did not prepare the so-called Citizens’ budget, which aims to present the citizens with its revenues and expenditures in a simple and understandable way.
No Strategy for Development of the Parliament of Montenegro has been adopted.
There was no word about the need to change and improve the Rules of Procedure of the Parliament, which would review the procedures that in practice create confusion and problems, but also often obscure and controversial way of functioning of the Collegium of the President of the Parliament.
Instead of the anticipated progress in the sphere of openness, parliaments in the region have achieved a weaker performance compared to the previous period of the research. Thus, openness in 2017, on average, is 61% of the indicators met. This result is less than 2% in relation to the openness in 2016, when it was 63%.