6.1 Introduction
Both the object and the approach of this chapter are thought-provoking and in need of clarifications, not only with regard to the general theory of democracy but also, and especially, with regard to their own meaning in international institutional law.Footnote 1 Applying the notions of ‘democratic representation’ and ‘parliamentarization’ to international organizations (IOs) is no small undertaking and carries its share of weighted connotations. To be precise, ‘democratic representation’ is not ‘representative democracy’, and, consequently, ‘parliamentarization’ is not a variation of democratic representation in the way that ‘parliamentarism’ is a variation of representative democracy.Footnote 2 One must be wary of false friends and false pretences.
First, democratic representation is not the same as representative democracy. Unlike what the latter notion seems to suggest, democratic representation is not about apprehending IOs as political systems or forms of government. Nor is it self-evident to associate democratic representation with the governance (rather than government) of IOs since governance refers to the way in which international (normative) power is exercised in or through IOs. In any event, this association deserves further evaluation, and it is one of this chapter’s objectives. The European Union (EU) is an exception worth mentioning: its functioning is uniquely ‘founded on representative democracy’,Footnote 3 even if it does not escape duality. In the EU, representative democracy is – at the risk of falling sometimes into oxymoron, sometimes into pleonasm – direct in the European Parliament, and indirect in the Council – through governments ‘themselves democratically accountable, either to their national parliaments, or to their citizens’.Footnote 4
As for democratic representation in relation to IOs, this notion appears in the discourses on the democratic deficit of which IOs are accused under the combined effect of two phenomena. On the one hand, the end of the Cold War led to the universalization of democracy as a form of government and political system suitable for States. While the promotion of democracy in the States by IOs is not the object of this contribution, the fact remains that the generalization and idealization of democracy in States has spread to the institutions they have created in the international order.Footnote 5 On the other hand, and correlatively, contemporary globalization has been accompanied by an internationalization of the exercise of public power. In other words, more and more decisions affecting individuals are now taken jointly by States within IOs and the IOs participate in the exercise of international public authority and establish themselves as international governance bodies.Footnote 6 As IOs have become the seat of a true international (normative) power (understood as the elaboration process of international norms, including soft norms as they can affect individuals), they are subjected to democratic requirements. Without pretending to entrust the exercise of such power to an untraceable international people, the ‘democratization’ of IOs aims at bringing the human component of States closer to international governance bodies so that individuals may ‘understand’ themselves as the authors of the international norms that affect them.Footnote 7 In that sense, international democracy is ‘understood as an institutional form providing accountable channels of representation between people and governments, and producing policies based on this interaction’.Footnote 8 Democratic representation is one of the tools for the ‘democratization’ of IOs. It is also one of the most classic, even if its modalities have evolved and taken different shapes.
Applied to IOs in the context of globalization, democratic representation can be defined as the legal mechanisms and techniques that make the voice of individuals heard and make individuals present in the functioning of IOs, particularly in the elaboration process of international norms (including soft norms) of which IOs are the crucibles. As a result, democratic representation is a driver in the movement to reform the law of IOs into a new law of international institutions.
Indeed, if IOs are ‘ultimately, nothing more than the “personification of a representative system”’, that system is inherently ‘intergovernmental’.Footnote 9 Traditionally, IOs make (Member or non-Member) States present in their functioning – including in decision-making processes – through their governments. The fact that some IOs have extended membership to non-State entities has altered the principle of the governmental representation of States, but it did not call it into question, even if this principle has known some long-standing exceptions.Footnote 10 Traditionally, the governmental representation of States assured the legitimacy of the power exercised by IOs, including a form of indirect democratic legitimacy when State governments are democratically elected. This perception remains relevant, as evidenced by a report of the Swiss Federal Council on the ‘democratization of the United Nations’ and according to which ‘[d]emocratic UN member States, such as Switzerland, have a democratically legitimate government, and therefore also a democratically legitimate representation at the UN’.Footnote 11 After noting that the United Nations (UN) Charter leaves no room for parliaments in the UN structure, the Standing Committee on United Nations Affairs of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) took a qualitative leap and concluded that the ‘“Peoples of the United Nations” are represented by governments, and not by the representatives they have elected’.Footnote 12 Beyond the governmental representation of States, there would also be democratic representation by governments.
In addition to the looseness of the representative link with individuals,Footnote 13 not all State governments enjoy democratic legitimacy. By introducing parliaments – ‘the cornerstone of functioning democracies’Footnote 14 – into the machinery of IOs, parliamentarization aims precisely at correcting the democratic limits of the governmental representation of States … without necessarily coinciding with democratic representation.
Next, the parliamentarization of IOs claims to involve national parliaments to a greater extent, whether as such, through their members, or through the institutions that convene them, first and foremost the IPU. The plural character of this parliamentarization is apparent from the outset, at the level of both its actors and its modalities, given that this ‘involvement’ covers a whole range of mechanisms, instruments, and techniques whose nature varies: representative, consultative, participatory. Understood like this, the parliamentarization of IOs gets closer to related notions without being confused with them.
First, the parliamentarization of IOs is distinct from the parliamentarism of political theory, which, as a form of representative government, is based on the elective principle. Because of the ‘particularly great distance separating individuals from international governance institutions … the electoral technique allowing the governed to directly choose their rulers remains logically marginal at the universal level, even if it is carried out for the appointment of MEPs [Members of the European Parliament] who share the exercise of legislative power with the EU Council’.Footnote 15 The parliamentarization of IOs largely ignores the elective principle, including when it rests upon the representative technique.
Second, the parliamentarization of IOs differs from parliamentary diplomacy by its modalities and actors, even if it also contributes to bridging the democratic deficit of international relations.Footnote 16 On the one hand, the parliamentarization of IOs only considers the involvement of parliaments within IOs, and not the role that these parliaments may play, at the national level, on their governments’ international action. On the other hand, the parliamentarization of IOs encompasses the parliamentary world lato sensu, that is to say, beyond national parliaments. In addition to national parliaments and their members, the parliamentarization of IOs also concerns international parliamentary institutions, which include international parliamentary bodies – still known as international parliaments – and interparliamentary assemblies.Footnote 17 The former are organs of an IO, especially at the regional level; the latter are created by agreement outside any IO, but remain established in connection with and/or under the aegis of an IO, when they are not themselves constitutive of an IO. The IPU is an ‘international organization sui generis, that is, it is an international parliamentary, political and representative organization’.Footnote 18 International parliamentary institutions appear to be a decisive instrument for the parliamentarization of IOs because they bring about the (sometimes personified) institutionalization of international parliamentary representation. Yet, with such definitions, they mostly feed the democratic ambivalence of the parliamentarization of IOs and the confusion between parliamentary presence and democratic representation.
Finally, although parliamentarization seeks the democratization of IOs, the extent to which parliamentarization advances democratic representation within these IOs deserves further discussion. In other words, while the parliamentarization of IOs may contribute to reducing the distance separating individuals from international governance bodies, it is not necessarily by making individuals or their interests present in the exercise of the international normative power of which such bodies are the seat. From this perspective, in the era of globalization, the parliamentarization of IOs feeds into the democratic illusion – ‘to qualify this form of representation without reality’Footnote 19 – which ultimately excludes individuals from decision-making. In particular, the parliamentarization of representation does not necessarily mean the democratization of the representative link in IOs. False friends and false pretences reappear.
To better identify these false friends and false pretences, it is necessary to separate, on the one hand, the question of who represents and how, and, on the other, the question of what is represented, and why. Do the parliamentary modalities of representation (who represents and how) in IOs give them a democratic object (who is represented and why)? The plurality of the former precludes a clear-cut answer. The duality of international parliamentary institutions and the diversity of their relations with IOs are worthy of special attention and call for distinguishing what is represented in and by these different international parliamentary institutions and their members. The measure of democratic representation found in IOs is clearly not the same in these two hypotheses.
On the one hand, representation in international parliamentary institutions reveals that the parliamentary representative can be a false friend of the democratic representative in IOs (Section 6.2). On the other hand, representation by international parliamentary institutions or their members is often a mere false pretence of democratic representation in IOs despite some actual democratic virtues for their functioning (Section 6.3).
6.2 The Realities Represented in International Parliamentary Institutions: The Parliamentary Representative, a False Friend of the Democratic Representative?
This section focuses on what international parliamentary institutions members ut singuli make present within them. From this viewpoint, the very composition of international parliamentary institutions suggests that representation is double, if not dual. It stems from the statutory duality of their members due to their quality, but also to their designation modalities. In this respect, States’ human component is obviously present in these institutions if their members are elected by direct universal suffrage. But in practice, this configuration remains exceptional for international parliamentary organs, and is never realized for interparliamentary assemblies, which can also admit parliaments as members (Section 6.2.1). Thus, the most frequent hypothesis remains that of the ‘dual mandate’ of the members of international parliamentary institutions, which raises questions about the entity on whose behalf they speak (Section 6.2.2).
6.2.1 The Statutory Duality of the Parliamentary Representative
Duality emerges, first, at the level of the modalities for designating the members of international parliamentary institutions. In addition to elections by direct universal suffrage (which guarantee the immediacy of the link of democratic representation), members can also come from national parliaments. International parliamentary bodies combine these two modalities, which can compromise the representative status of the individuals who compose them (ii). While interparliamentary assemblies exclude elections by direct universal suffrage, the representative function of the national parliamentarians within them remains dual depending on whether the members of such assemblies are the national parliamentarians directly or their national parliaments (i).
(i) An election by direct universal suffrage is completely and logically inapplicable to interparliamentary assemblies, the purpose of which is to bring together parliamentarians from different States on the basis of an agreement between them or possibly between their governments. At the regional level, the Nordic Council comprises eighty-seven members who ‘are members of the national parliaments and are nominated by the party groups’.Footnote 20 Similarly, both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) assemblies are a mere institutionalized form of parliamentary diplomacy. Created in 1955 by an interparliamentary initiative as the annual conference of NATO parliamentarians, the former ‘consists of parliamentary delegates who are selected from the members of national parliaments of member countries of the Atlantic Alliance by the procedure best suited to each country’.Footnote 21 The latter was created by the Charter of Paris for a New Europe and brings together 323 parliamentarians from fifty-seven European, Asian, and North American States.Footnote 22 Although the Charter of Paris is a non-conventional concerted act, its interstate character brings the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly closer to the Latin American and Caribbean Parliament, known as ‘Parlatino’. Established by a 1987 treaty in which the States of that region gathered in an intergovernmental conference agreed ‘on the Institutionalization of the regional, permanent and unique organization denominated the Latin American Parliament’,Footnote 23 the Parlatino’s membership has extended beyond parliamentarians themselves to include ‘congresses or Legislative Assemblies of member States, which have been democratically constituted’.Footnote 24 On a universal scale, the IPU, that is, ‘the global organization of national parliaments’,Footnote 25 utilizes an identical schema even though it was established solely by parliamentarians in 1889.Footnote 26
In any event, the internal representative logic seems to depart from that of the Parliamentary Assemblies of NATO or the OSCE which ‘directly’ bring together national delegations of parliamentarians. If parliamentarians participate in the functioning of the IPU or the Parlatino, is it then not to make member parliaments present within them? The IPU actually requires that the delegations of parliamentarians be accountable to the parliament from which they come.Footnote 27 Given that the Parlatino was created by an intergovernmental treaty, it is not incongruous to consider that the parliament is apprehended as a State organ, which questions the democratic object of parliamentary representation.Footnote 28 Only the election of members of international parliamentary institutions by direct universal suffrage sweeps away any doubt as to their status as democratic representatives. Yet, in that respect, the European Parliament remains an exception.
(ii) International parliaments can also be distinguished by their composition. On the one hand, several of them merely draw their members from the pool of parliaments of the Member States of the IO of which they are an organ. The Assembly of the Council of Europe,Footnote 29 or the Benelux Inter-Parliamentary Assembly, for example, do not seek to elect their members by direct universal suffrage. It is also significant that the latter recently replaced the Benelux Inter-Parliamentary Consultative Council that had been established in 1955 without at any time raising the question of a change in its composition.Footnote 30 It should be noted, however, that members of the Pan-African Parliament (which is intended to become an organ of the African Union beyond the African Economic Community) should be elected by the parliaments or any deliberative body of the Member States, but outside their own members.Footnote 31
On the other hand, with the exception of the European Parliament, only the members of the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN, an organ of the Central American Integration System)Footnote 32 are elected by direct universal suffrage.Footnote 33 Several parliamentary bodies of regional integration organizations aspire to have their members elected by direct universal suffrage.Footnote 34 However, this objective is not yet (or not yet fully) effective despite claims to that effect in existing legal provisions. The Parliament of the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR), that is, PARLASUR, and the Parliament of the Andean Community (Andean Parliament) offer an illustration, as the designation of their members by direct universal suffrage remains partial and variable. The 2005 Protocol that established the PARLASUR and replaced the previous Joint Parliamentary Committee (which was composed of delegates from national parliaments)Footnote 35 provides for the election of its members by direct universal suffrage.Footnote 36 While this requires legislative adjustments in the MERCOSUR Member States, Argentina is the only State to have introduced direct universal suffrage for the election of PARLASUR members. Moreover, a decision of the Council of the Common Market has postponed until 2030 the transitional phase to direct universal suffrage elections.Footnote 37 Although the founding texts of the Andean Parliament are old,Footnote 38 in 2021 only three States had organized elections specifically for the appointment of its members,Footnote 39 while Chile and Colombia continued to send national parliamentarians. As a result, there is a duality among the members of these parliaments in terms of their designation method.Footnote 40
In the Parliament of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the situation is homogeneous, but at the expense of elections by direct universal suffrage. More specifically, the Supplementary Act relating to the enhancement of the powers of the ECOWAS ParliamentFootnote 41 provides for elections by direct universal suffrage in order for its members to be ‘representing all the peoples of the Community’.Footnote 42 Yet, the same Act further provides for a transitional solution consisting in electing the deputies to the ECOWAS Parliament within each ‘National Assemblies of Member States or their equivalent institutions or organs’.Footnote 43 To this day, the evolution towards an election by direct universal suffrage remains an objective of the current legislature, as well as the subject of reflection within an ad hoc committee set up in 2020 and which issued a report on this matter in 2021.Footnote 44 As with interparliamentary assemblies, the ECOWAS Parliament and almost all international parliamentary organs remain composed of delegations of national parliamentarians.Footnote 45 Consequently, in international parliamentary institutions, dual mandates seem to be the rule, which blurs the contours of the reality that their members make present within these institutions.
6.2.2 Parliamentary Representatives: Between Duplication and Functional Ambivalence
On whose behalf do the members of international parliamentary institutions speak? National peoples, regional populations, the States of which they are an organ, or the national parliament? The answer provided by regulatory texts is not obvious. In this respect, it is necessary to distinguish, based on the quality of the members of these institutions, the parliamentarians (ii) and the parliaments to which they belong (i).
(i) When the members of international parliamentary institutions are national parliamentary institutions, the statutory ambiguity of the latter in the internal order – national parliaments are both the representative institution of the citizens and an organ of the State – has repercussions on the representation that they can ensure in international institutions and, more specifically, in interparliamentary assemblies. The ambiguity is all the greater since member parliaments are represented in the organs of the interparliamentary assembly by some of their own members. Pursuant to the IPU Statutes, its Assembly is composed ‘of parliamentarians designated as delegates by the Members of the IPU’.Footnote 46 Such a multiplication of the representative link obscures the reality that is represented. Moreover, despite the emphasis placed on reinforcing the participation of peoples or populations, the normative origin of an assembly of national parliaments will influence the way in which its members are perceived. As mentioned above, this is particularly clear for the Parlatino, whose constitutive act is an interstate treaty. Its preamble acknowledges ‘that the participation of the Latin American countries through the diversity of their political and ideological inclinations, represented in their national Parliaments, ensure the democratic foundation for integration’.Footnote 47 Is it then not the State, rather than its citizens, that each national parliament makes present within the Parlatino? Conversely, the preamble to the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Assembly (AIPA) Statutes, which is of interparliamentary origin, brings to fore the democratic dimension of member parliaments by affirming their conviction ‘that the strength of ASEAN emanates from the roots of our societies and that closer cooperation among the respective legislatures would result in greater participation by the peoples of ASEAN Member States’.Footnote 48
(ii) The direct participation of national parliamentarians in international parliamentary institutions is also not without ambivalence.
On the one hand, they can appear, at times, as representatives of their national parliament or of a human component, whether national or transnational, singular or plural. For instance, the parliamentarians who compose the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly are ‘representing their national parliaments’,Footnote 49 in the same way as the NATO Parliamentary Assembly ‘by virtue of its membership drawn from the various national parliaments, provides a link between the NATO authorities and these parliaments’.Footnote 50 However, in the transitional composition which is still that of the ECOWAS Parliament,Footnote 51 its members ‘represent all the peoples of the Community’.Footnote 52 Similarly, the ‘Pan African parliamentarians shall represent all the peoples of Africa and the interests of the African diaspora’,Footnote 53 while the Andean Parliament brings together ‘representatives of the peoples of each of the contracting parties’.Footnote 54 Yet, the interstate normative origin of these two regional parliaments paradoxically suggests that their members also make present the States to which they belong.Footnote 55 The wording of Article 25(a) of the Statute of the Council of Europe used to convey the same incongruity with regard to the Consultative Assembly of this organization, which was said to ‘consist of Representatives of each Member, elected by its Parliament from among the members thereof, or appointed from among the members of that Parliament, in such manner as it shall decide’.Footnote 56
On the other hand, and correlatively, the trouble stems from the ‘dual mandate’ with which members of international parliamentary institutions are deemed to be invested as soon as they are chosen from among national parliamentarians, ‘thus serving both at the national and the international level’.Footnote 57 Their provenance can certainly help to establish their legitimacy, but it also has disadvantages if they ‘consider themselves primarily as representative of home parliaments and look at the priorities of IPIs [International Parliamentary Institutions] exclusively through the prism of national priorities’.Footnote 58 As Martin Quesnel aptly underscores, one must also add to this:
the competition that may exist between national parliamentarians of a geographical area and international parliamentarians elected to represent that group. It is not easy to determine who has the legitimacy of representation on a question that is both of national and international interest … This type of competition for democratic representation is likely to push international parliaments to seek both the careful defense of the interests of a defined community, and to account for the national public opinion.Footnote 59
But this then slides from the issue of representation in international parliaments to the issue of representation by international parliaments, all the more so since they have the characteristic of being an integral part of the organic architecture of an IO.
6.3 The Realities Represented by International Parliamentary Institutions: False Pretences of Democratic Representation in IOs?
On whose behalf do IPIs speak? And, consequently, whom do they make present in the IOs to which they are functionally linked, when they are not an organ thereof? The answer to this question overlaps, at least in part, with that of representation in the international parliamentary institution when the international parliamentary institution is a component of the organic apparatus of an IO.Footnote 60 But it is not perfectly identical, a fortiori when the relationship with the IO is only functional. In any event, the representative link with individuals is significantly loosened, and the gap widens even further in the hypothesis of interparliamentary assemblies jointly established by some of these organizations. The IPU and its various relationships with intergovernmental organizations (first among them the UN) illustrate the distention and the multiplication of the relationship with individuals, a relationship which then has only the appearances of a representative link (Section 6.3.1). It therefore seems that parliamentary involvement in IOs allows for the adjustment of democratic principles to these organizations, rather than a true democratic representation. In other words, IPIs encourage and promote a more inclusive, transparent, and accountable functioning of IOs, but without necessarily making the voice of individuals heard (Section 6.3.2).
6.3.1 Between Multiplication and Distension: An ‘en Trompe l’Œil’ Representative Link with the Individuals
‘In a world that increasingly suffers from the lack of legitimacy and transparency, and where the creation of a global parliament is an unlikely scenario in a foreseeable future, IPIs can establish themselves as a contributor to a more democratic … global governance’.Footnote 61 International parliamentary institutions can do so through their representative function. Still, it remains necessary to specify the terms of such a function and to clarify its holder before assessing its democratic nature, that is, the extent to which the representative function can make the voice of individuals heard in the functioning of international governance bodies such as IOs. On the one hand, the distribution of the representative function in IOs between IPIs and their members is ambiguous (i). On the other hand, and correspondingly, the distance is widening between the place of representation – the IOs – and the reality represented – the individuals (ii).
(i) The representative function of international parliamentary organs in their respective IO doubles, if not replicates, that of their member parliamentarians when they are, or are entitled to be, elected by direct universal suffrage. The ECOWAS Parliament does not seem to add any representative value in relation to its members within the Community, since both are meant to represent ‘all the peoples of the Community’.Footnote 62 Currently, the Treaty on European Union provides that MEPs are also ‘representatives of Union’s citizens’, who are thus ‘directly represented at Union level in the European Parliament’.Footnote 63 But this has not always been the case within the EU, and, including for international parliamentary bodies, the representative function in the IO to which they belong may not exactly overlap with that which their own members perform within them. The networking of parliamentarians and its institutionalization seem to allow for the transnationalization of representation. In other words, the international parliamentary institution accumulates and transcends the representation of the national human component that each of its members individually ensures, in order to mediate a representation of the human as a whole. PARLASUR parliamentarians are thus representatives of the citizens of the States parties to the Treaty establishing the PARLASUR in which they were respectively elected, while the PARLASUR is the organ representing all the peoples of MERCOSUR.Footnote 64 The same applies to the representation in the Andean Community by the Andean Parliament or its members.Footnote 65 The representative function is then no longer doubled, but double in the IO, depending on whether one considers the international parliamentary organ or its member components. In all these cases, its object nevertheless remains democratic, which is doubtful in the case of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and its members, who, in addition to government representation in the Committee of Ministers, seem to mediate a parliamentary presence of Member States in the Council of Europe.Footnote 66
The logic is somewhat different for interparliamentary assemblies that are not formally integrated into an IO with which they may nevertheless maintain close functional relations. Interparliamentary assemblies are intended to bring a parliamentary dimension to the work of one or more IOs and are rarely expressly endowed with a representative function. This is obvious with the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, whose purpose is simply to support and strengthen OSCE missions alongside it.Footnote 67 In many respects, the same applies to the Parliamentary Conference on the World Trade Organization (PCWTO), established jointly by the IPU and the European Parliament in 2003.Footnote 68 While it is true that the NATO Parliamentary Assembly ‘provides a link between the NATO authorities and these parliaments’,Footnote 69 like the previous ones, it does not enjoy any representative status in NATO.Footnote 70 From this point of view, the IPU is taking a qualitative leap forward at the UN.
Created in 1889 (much earlier than the UN), the IPU has, for a long time, enjoyed only a consultative status with the Economic and Social Council, in accordance with Article 71 of the UN Charter.Footnote 71 Beyond the fact that such a status did not seem adapted to the nature of the IPU, which was endowed with international legal personality by its Statutes,Footnote 72 it did not entail any right to participate in the work of the UN. Yet, it was only fifty years after its creation that the UN considered changing this status. The initiative came from its General Assembly (UNGA), which, in 1995, expressed its desire to ‘strengthen … existing cooperation between the United Nations and the Inter-Parliamentary Union and … giv[e] it a new and adequate framework’.Footnote 73 This framework was first established by a cooperation agreement concluded less than a year later in order to provide the IPU with an ‘appropriate representation’ within the UN and allow it to attend the plenary sessions of the UNGA, and to participate in the meetings of the subsidiary organs and in the work of the conferences held under the auspices of the UN when matters falling within the mandate, activities, and competences of the IPU are considered.Footnote 74 This framework was expanded in 2002 with the granting of observer status within the UNGA,Footnote 75 which then led to the reformation of the cooperation relationship into a new agreement signed during the summer of 2016.Footnote 76 Each time, the evolution of the representative status of the IPU was motivated by the UN’s observation that the IPU is a ‘world organization of parliaments’.Footnote 77 At the same time, the First World Conference of Speakers of Parliament, held in New York in 2000, took note of the transformation of international relations and called for consolidating not only the role of the IPU ‘as a world organization for inter-parliamentary cooperation and for relaying the vision and will of its members to intergovernmental organizations’, but also ‘the role of parliament and its members as intermediaries between a complex international decision-making process and citizens’.Footnote 78 What emerges here is the multiplication of the links of representation established by the IPU, by the national parliaments that are members of that organization, and by the parliamentarians who compose these national parliaments. It is not certain that this effectively contributes to making the voice of individuals heard in international governance bodies.Footnote 79
(ii) Of the IPU or its members, who makes the other present in IOs, especially the UN, and in whose name does each speak? The reports on ‘Interaction between the United Nations, national parliaments and the Inter-Parliamentary Union’ issued to date by the UN Secretary-General and the corresponding UNGA Resolutions do not answer this question because they simultaneously address the international role of the IPU and of the national parliaments.Footnote 80 With regard to the IPU’s representative function in the UN, a 2022 UNGA resolution on this subject recalls, like the previous ones that, in the Outcome Document of the 2005 World Summit, ‘Heads of State and Government resolved to strengthen further cooperation between the United Nations and national parliaments through their world organization, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, in all fields of the work of the United Nations’.Footnote 81 As observed by Ian Brownlie and Guy S. Goodwin-Gill, there is, on the part of State governments, an ‘implied recognition of the IPU as an organization that represents the parliaments as representatives of the peoples’.Footnote 82
For its part, the IPU seems to see itself as the relay, in IOs in general and in the UN in particular, of the representative democracy embodied by its members. In this sense, its 2022–2026 Strategy commits ‘to further strengthen the parliamentary dimension of multilateralism and global governance including the voice of parliaments at the United Nations and other multilateral organizations’.Footnote 83 The IPU Governing Council, at its 210th session in October 2022, considered and approved the report on the IPU Policy Project at the UN which ‘provides a roadmap to intensify the IPU’s work with the United Nations on behalf of parliaments’.Footnote 84
In the UN as in other IOs, the IPU would thus be the representative of representatives democratically elected at the national level. In other words, there would be a form of cascading parliamentary representation of citizens and peoples, which remain defined within the framework of the State. Admittedly, there is a practical explanation for this multilayered democratic representation: the particularly large distance that separates the human component of States and IOs would call for such a superimposing of links of representation. And the mandatory nature of the IPU’s representative function could moderate the stretching of democratic representation that it performs in IOs. But there are two reservations to that.
First, with regard to the nature of the representative relationship between the IPU and its members, the recent analysis of the IPU’s political project at the UN notes with a certain disenchantment that ‘too many [members of parliament] around the world – including those engaged with the IPU – are not fully aware of or do not fully understand the IPU’s mission at the UN. One significant reason for this is that much of the IPU’s political work at the UN is not reaching national parliaments’.Footnote 85 In these conditions, how can ‘all of this [be] done by the IPU at the request of parliaments’?Footnote 86 Second, the technical argument of distancing is short-lived when, alongside the IPU, the direct involvement of national parliaments and/or their members is maintained, and even encouraged, at the UN, which regularly praises ‘the practice of including parliamentarians as members of national delegations to major United Nations meetings and events … and invites Member States to continue this practice in a more regular and systematic manner’.Footnote 87 As a result, the ways of bringing the voice of parliamentarians to the UN have diversified: there is not only the inclusion of parliamentarians in Member States’ delegations, but also parliamentary hearings and the organization of meetings and conferences as adjuncts to major intergovernmental meetings.Footnote 88 Does this allow for the voice of individuals to be heard? The diversity of parliamentary involvement in IOs may contribute to their democratization, but without necessarily conveying democratic representation.
6.3.2 Parliamentary Involvement and the Democratic Acculturation of IOs
The involvement of national parliaments and their members in the functioning of IOs, whether through IPIs or directly, promotes and encourages the acclimatization of democratic principles traditionally associated with deliberative democracy and centred on the principle of Habermasian discussion. In truth, such a democratic acculturation of IOs does not exclude any representative mechanism and often accompanies it. According to Patrizia Nanz and Jens Steffek:
In a nutshell, deliberative democracy must ensure that citizens’ concerns feed into the policymaking process and are taken into account when it comes to a decision on binding rules. What is important to the notion of public reasoning is not so much that everyone participates but more that … the process of (political) deliberation within international governance is open both to public scrutiny and to the input of stakeholders’ concerns.Footnote 89
On these last two aspects, the focus is then generally placed on the international civil society, embodied in particular by NGOs. However, national and international parliamentary institutions are also relevant. Some techniques for the parliamentarization of IOs make it possible to control the (inter)governmental action within IOs (i), while others tend to increase the transparency and inclusiveness of normative processes (ii).
(i) In its 2022 resolution on the interaction between the UN, national parliaments and the IPU, the UNGA acknowledges ‘the role and responsibility of national parliaments in regard to … ensuring greater transparency and accountability at both the national and the global levels’.Footnote 90 Yet, the parliamentary oversight of governmental action within IOs generally takes place at the national level and parliamentary accountability mechanisms remain marginal at the international level. The IPU’s political project at the UN confirms this ‘renationalization’ of parliamentary control over institutionalized international action of governments.Footnote 91 Further, according to the UN Secretary-General, ‘[p]arliaments, given their legislative and oversight mandates and their role in translating international instruments into national legislation, can make a unique contribution to United Nations processes’.Footnote 92 The implementation and monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and related instruments offer an excellent example.Footnote 93 However, the situation is different and parliamentary scrutiny becomes more international both in its form and its object when the IPU’s Standing Committee on UN Affairs conducts its work to ‘review implementation of international commitments’.Footnote 94 Created within the IPU in 2007 and made permanent in 2013, this Committee received a mandate from the IPU Governing Council to ‘examin[e] the overall working of the United Nations and its reform, in particular in terms of system-wide coherence, institutional effectiveness and the use of public funds’.Footnote 95 It is therefore not absurd to consider that, through this Committee, the IPU exercises, with regard to the universal intergovernmental organization, the equivalent of the traditional parliamentary function of governmental control. However, the representative logic endures, since the IPU considers that its Committee ‘helps to close the “democracy gap” between citizens’ voices and global decision-making. Its meetings ensure the voice of “we the people” is communicated to UN policy-makers’.Footnote 96 The Standing Committee then joins the mechanism of parliamentary hearings which ‘make it possible for parliamentarians to convey to UN Member States their views based on their own national and local experiences’.Footnote 97 Generally organized on a common theme at an upcoming intergovernmental conference,Footnote 98 these hearings contribute more to the inclusiveness of the normative process within the UN than to its control, by enriching it with a parliamentary perspective.
(ii) The parliamentarization of IOs undoubtedly helps to diversify the interests taken into account and the points of view expressed, particularly in the normative process of which they may be the seat. Parliamentarization, in essence, makes it possible to overcome the intergovernmentalism that traditionally characterizes such a process. International parliamentary institutions are therefore doubly conducive to fostering greater inclusion in IOs.
First, attention is placed on the composition of delegations of parliamentarians brought together by IPIs when they are themselves constitutive or an organ of an IO. Indeed, such delegations are often encouraged or compelled to be inclusive and, thus, contribute to diversifying, ‘from within’, the interests represented in IOs. In addition to the diversity of political opinions, the delegations participating in IPIs must also represent societal diversity. For instance, while the AIPA General Assembly is an interparliamentary assembly, it brings together delegations from each member parliament, and at least three of the fifteen members of each delegation are women parliamentarians.Footnote 99 Among international parliamentary organs, EU Member States must also ensure gender equality when electing MEPs.Footnote 100 Finally, Article 4 of the Protocol to the Constitutive Act of the African Union on the Pan-African Parliament will tighten the requirement of parity. In addition to the requirement that the delegations of five parliamentarians from each State party must include at least two women (and no longer just one), a failure to respect this quota is sanctioned by a loss of accreditation.Footnote 101 From this point of view, this international parliamentary body joins the world organization of parliaments, whose Statutes promote under Article 10 both gender equality and youth representation in parliamentary delegations, and sanction a member parliament whose delegation comprises only parliamentarians of the same sex during two consecutive sessions of the IPU Assembly.Footnote 102 Other IOs have emulated this internal policy of the IPU.
Second, this time ‘from the outside’, the IPU has been able to export its ‘best practices’ on inclusiveness in the functioning of other IOs. The 2022 report of the Secretary-General on the interaction between the UN, national parliaments, and the IPU reaffirms that ‘[p]arliaments play a critical role in this regard, by helping to ensure that United Nations decision-making is informed by a wide range of views and opinions’.Footnote 103 In its subsequent resolution, the UNGA encouraged ‘the Secretary-General to include members of parliament, particularly from the developing countries, in multi-stakeholder high-level advisory groups as well as in mediation teams and other such exercises where a multiplicity of perspectives can help to ensure fair and lasting solutions to specific challenges’.Footnote 104 Finally, since COP 18, the functioning of the IPU has led the UN Conferences on Climate Change to a positive evolution in parity in the composition of their structures, as well as in that of the national delegations of the participating States. After generally encouraging the inclusion of women in the institutions established by the Climate Change Convention and its related texts, COP 18 adopted a ‘gender balance goal’ that participating States are invited to pursue in their national delegations and instructed the secretariat to ensure its follow-up.Footnote 105
While this is still just the representation of States, parliamentarization nonetheless directly influences its modalities in order to make it more ‘inclusive’, and therefore … more democratic!
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