Infographic: The state of legislative openness in South Africa

Global Legislative Openness Week (GLOW) – 15 to 25 September 2014 – has People's Assembly take a look at what constitutes “parliamentary openness”. GLOW is an initiative of the Legislative Openness Working Group of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) launched in 2011 with South Africa as one of the eight founders. It now consists of 64 countries committed to making their governments more accountable and transparent to their citizens.

The Declaration on Parliamentary Openness is a benchmark identifying all aspects of legislative openness and one can create a useful dashboard of indicators to evaluate our Parliament. This international standard was approved in 2012 by over 150 parliamentary monitoring organisations and is endorsed by a number of international associations of parliaments.

The Declaration is a call to national parliaments to make a renewed commitment to openness and engaging citizens in all matters relating to parliamentary work. It urges parliaments to i) promote a culture of openness and transparency, ii) keep accurate records of all parliamentary information, iii) make this data easily accessible and usable, and iv) utilise technology to adequately communicate vital information to their respective publics.

People's Assembly created an infographic analysing the South African Parliament's “openness”, using the Declaration. Although the legislature did not fare poorly in our overall analysis, scoring 62 out of 102, there were notable gaps that could be improved upon.