Parliamentary Oversight and Integrity Building in Security Institutions

Since it is particularly characteristic of the security institutions that some aspects of their work are not available to the public, the responsibility of the institutional actors who oversee them is quite high. Due to this the improvement of work of oversight institutions is of paramount importance for effective external oversight and achievement of general objectives of the security institutions.

Authors pointed out that the Parliament, as an external oversight actor, is yet to get involved effectively in the fight against corruption and integrity building in the security institutions. In the previous Parliament there were some improvements; for the first time ever the State Audit Institution’s report on annual financial report of a security service was discussed in the Parliament. The general impression is that the oversight has not been established yet in the aspects of security institutions’ work where there is the most prominent corruption risk; furthermore, the MPs failed to react to a number of affairs that over the past years indicated that there were examples of systemic corruption in some security institutions.

In this paper it will be provided an overview of the mechanisms that the Parliament has at its disposal in control and oversight of the security institutions and it will be assessed to which extent those mechanisms have been used so far, especially in the areas which are in the focus of our interest. The central part of the analysis aims at indicating at the problems which hinder effective parliamentary oversight. Finally, it will be analyzed an example of good practice, i.e. of an improvement which was noted during the oversight by the Committee for Control of Security Services; this will be done in order to establish which factors could contribute to the improvement of parliamentary oversight and a more active role of the Parliament in integrity building in the security sector.