Post-legislative scrutiny
In the Western Balkans, the parliaments are established as “legislative parliaments”, ones which mainly focus on debating and adopting legislation and where oversight is often limited to budget oversight. PLS then becomes a “new thing”: it broadens the oversight role of parliament, creates a new agenda, and sometimes also results in a new workload for staff and MPs.
This set of indicators aims to capture thematic issues which have been agreed upon by parliament and are embedded into PLS. Thematic indicators might encompass a broad array of issues such as equalities or gender issues, the environment and climate change, the Sustainable Development Goals, human rights, corruption, children’s rights, among several others. Without undermining the relevance and importance of other thematic indicators, this section will focus on gender, environment and climate change, as pilots.
The following indicators analyse how parliament applies the procedures, structures, and resources to effectively conduct PLS, the political interest in doing so, and how parliament assess the quality of PLS reporting and follow-up.
The first set of indicators focus on whether the law-making process and the constitutional, legal and regulatory frameworks that define executive-legislative relations enable PLS.
The following indicators assess the availability of parliamentary procedures, structures, and resources in parliament dedicated to conducting PLS.
As parliaments assume a responsibility to monitor whether the laws they have passed are implemented as intended and have the expected impact, post-legislative scrutiny (PLS) is increasingly recognized as an important dimension within the oversight role and the legislative role of parliament and an integral part of the legislative cycle.