With the new legislature convening for the first time yesterday, the Citizen's Congress Watch (CCW) yesterday urged lawmakers to allow more transparency and ban cross-party negotiations from taking place behind closed doors.
"The legislature spent NT$40 million [US$1.2 million] to install a video-on-demand [VOD] system that allows live online monitoring of legislative meetings," CCW president Ku Chung-hua (
"The money came from taxpayers' pockets -- so why doesn't the public have access to the system?" he asked.
PHOTO: KUO JIH-HSIAO, TAIPEI TIMES
CCW executive director Ho Tsung-hsun (
"If this can happen in a place where lawmakers aren't elected by universal suffrage, why can't the same thing take place here?" Ho asked.
He said Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (
"If you want privacy, please resign as legislator," Ku said.
Meanwhile, Hsieh Tung-ju (
Legislative regulations allow lawmakers to hold negotiations off the record and announce only the results.
"It's a lawmaker's job to represent the people, and when they do so, they should let the public see it," Hsieh said.
He added that simultaneous sign language should be provided along with the broadcasts.
The group also presented a list of lawmakers, who had signed an agreement to push for more transparency in the legislature.
Twenty-seven of the 81 legislators affiliated with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and 17 of the Democratic Progressive Party's 27 legislators -- or a total of 47 percent of the legislature -- had signed the document, the group said.
Besides demanding more transparency, Ho said the citizen's group would collect records of legislative meetings and invite academics and experts in different fields to review and analyze these meetings "so that voters will know who did what and if they were consistent."
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