Terms of reference of the reference of the Committee on Parliamentary and Public Relations

Order 489 (1993)

Author(s):

Parliamentary Assembly

Origin

See Doc. 6899, report of the Committee on Parliamentary and Public Relations, Rapporteur: Mr Colombo. Text adopted by the Standing Committee, acting on behalf of the Assembly, on 3 September 1993.

Thesaurus

The Assembly,

1. The Assembly wishes to step up interparliamentary co-operation, in particular by involving national parliaments more fully in its deliberations and by paying closer attention to the institutional problems of pluralist democracies, such as an imbalance between the constituent powers, a lack of confidence between citizens and their elected representatives and the democratic deficit in the process of European construction.

2. For that reason, the Assembly instructs its Committee on Parliamentary and Public Relations to develop its contacts with national parliaments with a view to helping them, by exchanging information and experience, by carrying out comparative studies and by organising meetings in various member states (see Order No. 452), to:

2.1 promote greater facility in dealing with common difficulties encountered in the course of their mandates;

2.2 ensure that action is taken on the texts adopted by the Council of Europe;

2.3 encourage compliance with the provisions of the Council of Europe's Statute in the framework of the democratic functioning of the parliaments of Council of Europe member states;

2.4 widen and enrich mutual understanding among the elected representatives of European countries and, through them, among the peoples they represent;

2.5 play their national role more effectively in the construction of Europe.

3. The Parliamentary Assembly furthermore invites the committee to develop its contacts with the international organisations within which national parliaments are rep-resented in order to help establish a necessary degree of coherence among their activities in different European and international contexts.

4. The Assembly also instructs its Committee on Parliamentary and Public Relations to continue intensifying relations with civil society and the mass media with a view to:

4.1 fostering greater awareness of the Council of Europe's work and of its role in European construction;

4.2 consolidating its own work on participatory democracy and the promotion of civil society.