"The onus is and will be on us, parliamentarians and our parliaments, to ensure that governments live up to the commitments that have been made and will be made next week", declared the Speaker of the National Assembly of South Africa, Dr. Frene Ginwala. She went on to say that MPs must hold governments to account, monitor commitments, promote and facilitate implementation, develop policies that meet the agreed objectives and release and direct financial resources to ensure that those policies can be implemented. "Only then will we be able to ensure that agreements reached here are more than reams of paper", stressed Dr Ginwala.

The Speaker of the South African National Assembly also underlined the importance of NEPAD, "the united view of this continent, of itself and for itself” which “sets an agenda for change and development based on principles of democracy, peace and security, inclusiveness and human rights. It offers a partnership for the developed and developing countries to work together for common goals and for our common benefit".

For the President of the IPU Council, Dr. Najma Heptulla, "parliamentarians, in their law-making capacity, their budget-making authority, and their role as monitors of the Executive, are central to the implementation of what will be agreed in Johannesburg. We must voice the aspirations of our people at the negotiations so that the final document is comprehensive and is reflective of popular aspirations". She recalled that MPs and the people "aspire for a world in which individual interests would be subordinated to the common good".

The President of the IPU Council stated that the success of the World Summit will be measured in terms of actual implementation of the negotiated outcome. "A strong parliamentary follow-up mechanism to the Declaration and Plan of implementation is crucial for its success", she emphasised.

The Secretary General of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), Mr. Nitin Desai also took the floor at the parliamentary meeting. "We have always said that sustainable development is not simply a matter of the policy of the executive branch of government. It is something that will only work if we mobilise all parts of the governance system and also all parts of the civil society. In Johannesburg we really have the representation of all these people", declared Mr. Desai. For the Secretary General of the WSSD "there is an enormous amount that parliaments can do in order to further sustainable development at the national level, but there is also an enormous amount they can do to further sustainable development at the global level. Every bit of environmental legislation that they will prepare at the global level is ultimately subject to ratification. In most countries it is parliaments which are involved in this ratification process". He also evidenced "the role of donor countries in deciding how the resources will be used and through that mechanism, parliaments can certainly influence the way in which resources can be used for sustainable development".

The Minister for Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Mr. Valli Moosa, addressed the parliamentary meeting. He described the current situation at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, and its realistic expectations, four days after a two-week summit. "We have to ask ourselves how are we going to ensure that this summit will be more than a talk shop? That is what led us to argue that the two overall themes of the Summit should be firstly poverty eradication, which is the biggest challenge that the world faces today with the growing gap between the rich and the poor and the hopelessness of those who live in abject poverty with no program and no ideas of how the poor will ever get out of this situation. And the second theme should be implementation and delivery, that this should be an action oriented summit", he underscored.