Translated material
Five Minutes of Hate
The Duma allowed factions to deviate from the meeting agenda
Yesterday, the State Duma adopted amendments to its rules of work, giving the right to representatives of factions to make five-minute statements on current issues at the beginning of plenary sessions. This idea matured among the three opposition factions after last year's October demarche, when they unanimously left the hall in protest against the official results of the regional elections on October 11.Deputies of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, A Just Russia and the Liberal Democratic Party created a working group and began to think about how they could protect their rights. Initially, they wanted to create a parliamentary commission to investigate the election results. In response, State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov proposed “reinstating the Duma commission, which was once headed by deputy Nikolai Gonchar,” with a more modest name “to verify facts of violations of election legislation.” As a result, the idea was drowned in disputes about how to form the commission - on a proportional basis, as United Russia wanted, in order to guarantee itself a majority of seats, or on a parity basis, as the opposition advocated.
Then the representatives of the parliamentary minority took up another issue. They complained that they could not convey their opinions to the general public. Previously, the State Duma regulations stipulated an “hour of statements” - at about 18.00 deputies could speak out on a wide range of issues. But oppositionists note that by this time many colleagues in the chamber, as well as journalists, mainly from electronic media, usually disperse. Therefore, now at the beginning of each meeting, all four Duma factions will be able to delegate a representative to talk about the most pressing issue for five minutes. Journalists have already dubbed the innovation “five minutes of hatred.” The working group took three months to prepare the amendment to the regulations.
As United Russia member Vladimir Aseev, First Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Regulations and Organization of Work of the State Duma, told the deputies, the factions themselves will determine their representatives for five-minute speeches. The day before, the head of the A Just Russia faction, Nikolai Levichev, told reporters that the Social Revolutionaries had already decided on the procedure for nominating deputies who would make five-minute statements. This decision will be made by the faction council, selecting the most competent deputy on the chosen topic to speak.
Nobody objected to the amendments to the regulations: the parliamentary majority represented by United Russia even made a small concession to the opposition. The head of the LDPR faction, Igor Lebedev, noted with satisfaction the very fact that after three months of work the working group was finally able to prepare and introduce changes to the Duma regulations.
The State Duma also established that each deputy distributes draft instructions to its specific committees in writing on Wednesdays and Fridays. And at the end of Friday’s plenary session, the chamber will decide whether to accept or reject specific parliamentary initiatives. According to the amendments to the State Duma regulations, the issue is put to a vote even if there are objections from the speaker or his deputies, as well as specific committees. The decision is made by a simple majority of votes.
In addition, the regulations set out the procedure for distributing draft instructions to committees and commissions of the State Duma in the plenary meeting hall. In this case, if the initiator is absent, the draft instruction is removed from consideration by the chamber.
The opposition working group has other ideas. For example, communists have long advocated live broadcasting of plenary sessions on television. But this proposal has not yet been submitted to the Duma Committee on Rules for consideration.