HEADQUARTERS PRESS CONFERENCE BY INTER-PARLIAMENTARY UNION

Press Briefing

HEADQUARTERS PRESS CONFERENCE BY INTER-PARLIAMENTARY UNION

The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), which will be holding its Conference of Presiding Officers of National Parliaments at Headquarters from 30 August to 1 September, seeks to bring "a parliamentary dimension" to the United Nations, Najma Heptulla, President of the Conference, told correspondents yesterday afternoon.

Accompanied by Anders Johnsson, Secretary-General of the Inter- Parliamentary Union, Dr. Heptulla made a brief opening statement before throwing the field open for questions. The Conference, she said, would be a historic event, with representatives of 141 countries participating. They would include 152 parliamentary Speakers and, in all, 412 Members of Parliament and delegates. The total number of participants over the three days of the conference would be between 900 and 1,000. The Conference was timed to precede the Millennium Summit session of the United Nations General Assembly, and would thus stress the importance of the United Nations to the IPU, which had long been committed to support of the Charter of the United Nations and the work of the United Nations system.

As Presiding Officers of their national Parliaments, Dr. Heptulla went on, the participants were representatives of their parliamentary systems and their peoples. What they expected from the Conference was to forge a more comprehensive relationship with the United Nations, an Organization with which the IPU shared a common agenda. The Conference would seek to stress that democracy was the only way of redressing people's problems, and that more and more countries were adopting it. Together with the United Nations, she said, the IPU sought to add a parliamentary dimension to the United Nations. And as Presiding Officers of their Parliaments, the participants would be translating the decisions taken by the United Nations and their own governments and facilitating the implementation of all those decisions back home. The IPU felt that as representatives of the voices of their peoples, participants should also be heard at the United Nations level.

A correspondent suggested that the list of participants at the Conference included countries many people would hesitate to classify as democratic. That being so, he asked Dr. Heptulla for her definition of democracy.

"An elected government", Dr. Heptulla replied, adding: "You don't interfere with the internal electoral processes of a country." As long as participants represented the voice of the people, that was what mattered. She elaborated by saying that once a country was a member of the IPU it would learn more about democracy in different countries and exchange views on the different forms of democracy. Mr. Anders reminded the correspondent that the IPU numbered some 140 members, and that almost all the non-members were small island

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developing States in the Caribbean and the Pacific. "In the IPU we don't ask whether a government is a good government or a bad government." All they asked, he said, was whether a national Parliament exercised the two basic parliamentary functions -- to legislate, and to oversee government action. The correspondent's question arose very often, he said, yet he had never heard anyone put the corresponding question to an intergovernmental organization -- for example, why were the governments of all those countries members of the United Nations, for example?

A correspondent noted that clerics from the delegation of Iran would be attending the Conference. Some of them were possibly implicated in the persecution and torture of dissidents. What would be the IPU's response to assertions that those clerics should not be allowed to participate?

Dr. Heptulla replied that the composition of the Iranian delegation "is decided by them". The Speaker of the Iranian Parliament would be attending, and the composition of his delegation was "entirely his problem". The IPU did not determine a delegation's composition.

The correspondent suggested that IPU's position must be that people responsible for human rights violations -- at least "according to international standards" -- would be welcome participants.

The IPU had no information on who had violated human rights in various countries, she replied. However, the IPU would "definitely like to find out", because it possessed a strong committee for the study of such violations and for the protection of the human rights of Members of Parliament. Not only for Members of Parliament, she added, but for the rights of individuals as well.

Asked for her reaction to the refusal by the United States State Department to allow a Cuban delegation to attend the conference, she said the situation was unfortunate. However, the Conference Steering Committee would be meeting today and tomorrow to discuss the refusal and reach a decision, "because we also work in democratic fashion". Asked whether she could give the official IPU view of the issue, she said "perhaps tomorrow, after we have met".

A reporter asked what kind of interaction the IPU now enjoyed with the United Nations, and what kind of relationship it hoped to have after the conference was over.

Dr. Heptulla said that the declaration that emerged from the Conference would state the aim of stronger relations with the United Nations. Relations had always been good, she added. The IPU had always supported the United Nations and its programmes, but it was hoped that the relationship that emerged from the coming three days of deliberations would be definitely stronger. As she had already said, the aim was to add the "parliamentary dimension" to the United Nations. How the declaration would be finalized would depend on what happened at

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the Conference, but the agenda for the meeting was clear, as was the IPU's full commitment to and support of the United Nations.

A correspondent asked how the IPU's input would differ from that of the representatives of Member States of the United Nations. "There is a difference", Dr. Heptulla replied. In the IPU, the voices of members of parliamentary oppositions were heard -- in other words, the voices of parliamentary minorities as well as majorities -- and not just those of governments. At the United Nations, only the views of governments were heard.

Asked whether the IPU "felt snubbed" because, as the questioner understood it, the United States Congress had not even responded to an invitation to attend the Conference, Dr. Heptulla said she could not comment on that. However, the IPU would very much like the United States Congress and Senate to be full participants in the IPU. The IPU represented world parliaments and world democracies, and the United States, as a major world democracy, would enrich the deliberations of the IPU. Mr. Johnsson added that perhaps the question might have been addressed to democracies such as the United Kingdom or France -- "all traditional allies of the United States" -- whose parliamentary representatives had been fully involved in preparing the Conference.

A correspondent asked who had decided that Pakistan would not be a participant at the Conference. Dr. Heptulla replied that the IPU had had to suspend Pakistan's membership because that country did not have a parliament. But she felt that in the near future, once parliamentary government was restored in Pakistan, it could reclaim full membership in the organization.

Another correspondent mentioned the likelihood that there would be protesters outside the Headquarters building denouncing the presence of Li Peng, who was considered to have been involved in the "Tienanmin Square killings", and asked for the panel's reaction. "People in democracies have the right to protest", said Dr. Heptulla, and people sitting in parliaments had the right to reply. Li Peng, she said, was the duly elected President of the Chinese Parliament, and as such was an invited participant, exactly like the representatives of the other countries, “big and small”, that would be participating.

Asked to comment on recent political events in Fiji, Dr. Heptulla said the whole situation was “very unfortunate”. The challenge to the Fijian Parliament, she said, was “not even a military coup” but an initiative launched by a private citizen. The IPU's position was that democracy should be still further strengthened so that such incidents did not recur.

Another correspondent asked the panel how the World Trade Organization (WTO) could be made more democratically accountable. Dr. Heptulla replied that parliamentary involvement in the WTO's affairs was the kind of remedial step the IPU was proposing. Asked how she thought Betty Boothroyd, the mercurial Speaker of the United

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Kingdom's House of Commons, would fare among a host of fellow- Parliamentary Speakers, Dr. Heptulla said Ms. Boothroyd's task at the Conference would be much easier than her House of Commons role. The only commotion likely to occur, she said, was the spectacle of all the participants shouting “Order! Order”! from their seats.

A correspondent returned to the issue of what he called the IPU's “rather technical” definition of democracy. "Would you not accept," he asked, “that the consequences of making your voice heard on Fifth Avenue in New York are very much less onerous than those of making your voice heard on Tienanmin Square”?

The two systems were different, said Dr. Heptulla, and the IPU respected national parliamentary procedures and prerogatives. She reiterated the view that to qualify as democracies, elected parliaments had the dual function of legislation and oversight of government action. Mr. Johnsson added that the IPU's definition of democracy was in fact somewhat more elaborate. He referred the questioner to the organization's universal declaration on democracy, adopted in 1987. There was another aspect to the issue, he said: the IPU was a forum for cooperative deliberation, aimed at seeking solutions to problems and conflicts through dialogue – “not by excluding somebody because we dislike his or her views but by including them and convincing them, through dialogue, to arrive at solutions”.

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