Report sheds light on MPs' performance

AMMAN — The Civil Coalition for Monitoring Elections and the Performance of Elected Councils (Rased) on Tuesday issued a report reflecting the 19th Lower House of Parliament’s performance in the first 100 days.

The Rased report covered 32 Lower House of Parliament working sessions during the period from December 10, 2020 until March 21, 2021.

Seventeen working days were designated to discuss legislative matters, while the remaining days were designated for the oversight performance of the government.

“Our report indicated that there is a development. The legislative and oversight performance by the MPs almost doubled the previous parliament in the first 100 years,” said Rased Director General Amer Bani Amer.

Bani Amer told The Jordan Times that there was a noticeable improvement in the number of questions that were asked by the MPs to the government and the discussions that followed.

“The deputies asked the government around 230 questions and over 60 answers were discussed during the sessions and this is a major important improvement that distinguished this Lower House of Parliament from the previous ones,” Bani Amer explained.  

In the past, Bani Amer stated, such procedure was “done in a limited scale”.

“The deputies in the past would have some 1,500 questions to the government and only 250 would be discussed under the Dome,” according to Bani Amer.

Meanwhile, the report stated that the government’s response to the deputies’ questions was 82 per cent.

In addition, the report pointed out that for the first time in the Parliament’s history, a female MP (Zeinab Musa from Southern Badia) topped the list in the number of questions to the government with 69 queries.

The report also stated that 37 male and female MPs attended all the parliamentary sessions, while 270 did not attend all sessions, including 200 who had excuses for failing to attend the sessions.

Bani Amer said that this report is the first of many that would cover the future work of Parliament by evaluating their performance with the ultimate hope of “reducing the gap between the Lower House of Parliament and the electoral bases”.