Parliament Holds a Secret Meeting
NY:
The parliament has decided to hold a secret session on Sunday 19 February to appraise performance of its presidency board and permanent committees as well as the work of its members and general secretariat amidst a strong refusal by a number of parliament members who considered secrecy of the session as aimed at hiding mistakes and non-existence of positive appraisal.That came during exchange of congratulations and criticisms between the presidency board members and MPs on the occasion of the victory scored by the former presidency board in the elections of last Wednesday. Chairman of human rights and freedoms committee MP Mohammed Naji al-Shaif disclosed that winning of the presidency board was not via balloting boxes as much as under directives of the president of the republic given to MPs of the majority in the parliament, congratulating the presidency board on the trust of the president in them.
Deputy chairman of the presidency board brigadier Yahya al-Raie was the most insistent on holding a secret session whereas head of the General People’s Congress parliamentary bloc Sultan al-Barkani and his deputy Yasser al-Awadhi were stressing the necessity of holding a public session so that each voter would know the role of the presidency board through the MP he had chosen….
Head of Islah parliamentary bloc Dr Abdulrahman Bafadhl justified holding the secret session as assessment would involve persons concerning their presence or absence those who worked and who did not work, and in his opinion there was no need to expose that in public….
Deputy Head of the Yemen Socialist Party bloc Dr Mohammed Saleh Ali told News Yemen he did not agree with holding a secret session as there was nothing to hide; indicating that it was the right of elector to know what was going on. He added that holding a secret meeting was not in harmony with the call for transparency in work of the parliament.
MP Abdulkarim Shaiban refuses the secret session and confirms the existence of many failures in the session. Among those is that the presidency board, according to article 22 of the regulation, has to follow up the committees and present a report on that at the beginning of each parliament session, but it does not do that. Moreover, there is no organizational regulation defining tasks of the board deputies and there is no acknowledgement of the presidency board’s organizational, legal, technical, administrative and financial structure and it has no financial bill although the board’s rules of procedure dictate these things and implementation of the rules is the responsibility of the MPs and the presidency board at the same time. He considers holding a secret session as offending the board.
