Reform of the United Nations was on the top of the agenda for the Heads of State who converged on New York in September to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the global body. Secretary- General Kofi Annan tabled a package of proposals which met with some lively debate. The purpose of the reforms is to make the United Nations a stronger organization, better equipped to respond to the people it is meant to serve. Ultimately, the United Nations has to become more democratic. Clearly, within the equation, there is a role for parliaments. The legislature is one of the three fundamental components of any democratic State.

Parliamentarians are elected by the people to represent their concerns both at the national level and - although this is less widely acknowledged - in the international sphere as well. Commitments that government delegates sign up to at the multilateral negotiating table also have to go to the parliament before they can be ratified and enforced. The role of the parliament is to exercise scrutiny over the process, from the initial drafting stage to final ratification and implementation. After many decades during which parliaments have been markedly absent from the United Nations, the Organization is now beginning to acknowledge the role of parliaments and their elected members as key guardians of democracy. The leaders of the world's parliaments held their own summit in the week preceding the United Nations High-level Meeting of Heads of State and Government. Speakers and presidents of more than 140 parliamentary chambers came to the United Nations in New York to bring their vision of multilateral cooperation to the hub of international politics and say how parliaments can fill the democracy gap in international relations.

Indeed how? Does this mean, for example, setting up a separate parliamentary assembly in the United Nations alongside the existing governmental General Assembly? Views diverge, but the broad opinion expressed in New York was that creating new institutions makes little practical or political sense. The real priority is to ensure that there is better – closer, deeper, more systematic and sustained – cooperation between national parliaments and the United Nations in all its diversity.

For this to happen, two changes need to take place. On the one hand, the United Nations should define a set of priorities within its vast agenda on which it can routinely seek the opinion of parliaments. On the other, the parliaments themselves must make sure they select the most qualified people to work on those issues. In other words, they must select those members of parliament whose experience both in parliamentary committees and their constituencies has given them real expertise.

The issues are all central to the Millennium Development Goals that the United Nations is struggling to meet. They encompass worldwide poverty and the related questions of financing for development and the rules of multilateral trade. They include the HIV/AIDS pandemic and other health issues. They are often directly related to the painful process of rebuilding institutions destroyed by violent strife. They affect all of our countries. All are underpinned by the need to reinforce the rule of law and human rights.

The Speakers of parliament have called for a new strategic partnership between the United Nations and the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), the world organization of parliaments. We note that the role of the IPU as the body representing the world's parliaments for this purpose was specifically recognized in the summit outcome document that the Heads of State and Government adopted in September.

At this time of self-appraisal and change, we believe that national parliaments working with the IPU represent the most credible option for serious parliamentary scrutiny of global institutions, and that we, the national parliaments, can turn this vision into reality.