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Topic Discussion III
Participation in
Democratic Decision-Making:
The Vital Voices of Women, Civil Society and
Pluralism
Room 1
(15 of 16 pages)
I think that we have to look into ways of developing democratic mechanisms instead
of criticizing the past experiments and complaining all the time. I am speaking about our internal situation in
Yemen as a comment. I'm going to speak about the Yemeni constitution, the central government and I think that Mr.
Abdul Kadar (ph) did not say that we have a local government bill before the parliament and that this bill is draft
law gives great powers to local institutions and local authorities and my exercise for national powers [inaudible]
to the central government. In fact these powers contained in the draft law are very extensive and which in fact,
this is not impeded by tribalism and we have had previous experience with such reforms and since 1975 we have experimented
with a cooperative projects which in fact carried out most of the development projects in the areas and local districts,
in spite of traditional customs and in spite of traditional constraints. Thank you sir.
Frank Loy: We have exactly six minutes left before we must break up and I have three persons on my list.
Mr. Ramish Veeling (ph), Miss. Bilquis, and Mr. Luis Beccar. So, let's try to keep within the time limits if you
can, so we can get all three of these comments in. And I call first on Mr. Ramish Veeling (ph).
Ramish Veeling (ph): Thank you. I'll try to be quite short. First of all I want to mention that Lana Gogoberidze,
one of best film makers in Georgia, and that's why she represents society and parliament, she has a good understanding
of needs of civil society. And unfortunately people in executive branch have extremely different background then
they lack this understanding. Especially our ombudsman who is Polish General and he uses this office for his political
career. We expect that he will run for presidency, but now he is retiring and we hope that new ombudsman will better
serve interest of civil society, especially human rights and if our candidate, not our, but candidate of coalition
of NGOs and independent media, publisher of independent newspaper will be elected by parliament to this job where
we think that human rights can significantly improve in Georgia.
I can tell that as Lana Gogberidze mentioned, 3,000 non-governmental organizations, but unfortunately, most of
them depend on foreign funding. And there is no local sources of funding and it's very dangerous because when this
foreign funding will go to end, this civil society will be rootless and I think we need to be well appropriate
legislation to encourage generation of local founding donations and things like I must underline that they non-governmental
organization have good access to parliament and to government also. They can influence decision-making process,
but it's totally because of support and cooperation with respective foreign organizations. For example, national
democrative institute, [inaudible] association, they contributed to us very much and we are very thankful. For
example, national democratic institute trained us and now we know how to conduct campaigns. When independent channel
was started to shut down illegally by our minister of telecommunications, we conduct campaign and in results, Supreme
Court ordered to restore this TV channels. And we conduct journalist investigations and in result we discover that
this minister is totally corrupt and he was forced to resign.
Now together with American Bar Association and USAB, we draft new law, which will guaranty independence of electronic
media by, create establishment, independent regulatory commission. And we hope that this law will be adopted soon.
Also together with American Bar Association, we prepared law on freedom of information which became part of new
administrative court which was approved by parliament just last week, and we hope that this will help media and
non-governmental organizations to fulfil their duties. Thank you.
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