Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Macedonia's parliament endorsed 262 laws, only 16 MPs attend session regularly

Since the constitution of the current Macedonian Parliament in 2008, the incumbent lawmakers held 81 session adopting 262 laws.

As little as 16 MPs had been present at all sessions, and 14 have never took the floor for a discussion, showed the results of the study conducted by the civic association MOST, which were published today in the report entitled "My Representative".

Jani Makraduli tops the list of the most active MPs with 117 discussions and 68 retorts, whereas MP Cvetanka Ivanova is ranked first in terms of the number of procedural interventions (53).

Hisen Xhemaili holds the first place in terms of unjustified absences from the sessions, whereas Arben Xhaferi and Menduh Thaci are the deputies with the most justified absences.

MOST's public opinion survey conducted in early January, showed that majority of citizens (38.2%) rarely watch the parliamentary sessions, 24% said they never watched them, 14.1% said they followed the lawmakers' activities on a regular basis, while 13.3% said they watched live broadcasts of the legislature home sessions at least two times a week.

The average grade on the parliament's activities given by the citizens, is 2.43.

Most of the respondents (42.1 %) said the parliament is fully dependant from the government in the decision-making process, 25.6% said the dependence is only partial, and 8.6% believe the lawmakers make their decision independently of the government.

According to 60.5% of those polled, Macedonian deputies are not fulfilling their duties properly, while 76.3% said they never had a meeting with a deputy from their electoral unit.

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