Super-Parliament Won't Fix Governance Problems

A proposal to set up a new quasi-parliamentary assembly with broad supervisory powers will not achieve its goal of curbing corruption in Kyrgyz politics. NBCentralAsia political commentators say the focus instead should be on reforming the existing parliament and electoral system.



The idea of a “People’s Kurultai” or congress came in a package of reforms put forward by a group of politicians and public figures on March 14. Former state secretary Dastan Sarygulov, who presented the programme, said, “By introducing the People’s Kurultai, we will be satisfying the constitutional principle that the people are the source of power.”



According to the plan, all the branches of authority - the Supreme Court, the prosecutor-general’s office, parliament, the Accounts Chamber, the president and the government – would all report to the Kurultai. The institution would consist of some 700 delegates elected from all over the country.



The idea is not entirely new, having been proposed before at the Constitutional Conference, a large ad hoc assembly convened in 2005 to drive through constitutional reforms in the wake of the revolt which ousted the then president Askar Akaev.



Supporters of the idea say it would make the administration of the state more subject to public scrutiny, and force state institutions to become more transparent.



Tursunbek Akun, who heads the president’s Human Rights Commission, argues that the Kurultai would be beyond reproach, a truly popular institution with the capacity to defuse political crises.



“Parliamentarians can be bribed into passing certain laws or making certain decisions, but the members of the People’s Kurultai couldn’t be bought,” he said.



However, NBCentralAsia political experts say creating a new institution of power would only make Kyrgyzstan’s already tangled system of government even more difficult to deal with.



Toktogul Kakchekeev, a political scientist and spokesman for the prosecutor-general’s office, said the Kurultai would simply duplicate parliament, and it would therefore make more sense to improve the performance of the existing elected body.



Tamerlan Ibraimov, director of the Centre for Political and Legal Studies, said parliament should be given greater powers and the electoral system improved. “A transparent electoral system should guarantee that the right candidates make it into parliament,” he said.



Former member of parliament Akylbek Kadyrbekov hopes that parliament will improve as a result of the system of proportional representation introduced when the constitution was amended late last year.



He noted that work is also needed on voter education, since “in recent elections, [people] learned to vote in return for money rather than for a candidate’s policies”.



(News Briefing Central Asia draws comment and analysis from a broad range of political observers across the region.)