ROMANIA
In Romania,
the two Chambers of Parliament have a specialised service system and their own
administrative bodies, those ensuring the autonomous functioning of the
Chambers. The structure of the Romanian Senate’s services has its legal basis
in the provisions of the Senate’s
Standing Orders, a document having the status of an internal law, and the
provisions of the Senate’s Decision Nr
20/2001 regarding the structure of the Senate’s services, approved by the
Standing Bureau on the Secretary’s General proposal.
The President and Standing Bureau of the Senate coordinate and control
the entire activity of the Senate and its services. The activity of the
services at the disposal of the Senators during their offices is managed and
controlled by the Secretary General of the Senate, who is the main chief
accountant and issues orders in exercising his powers. For the fulfillment of
his attributions in ensuring the proper functioning of the Senate, the
Secretary General is responsible before the Senate and the Standing Bureau. The
Secretary General of the Senate coordinates the activity of the expert
departments, provides the documents necessary to a proper development of the
Standing Bureau’s works and plenary sessions, ensures communication between
this legislative Chamber and the other institutions of the state by right.
According to the Standing orders, the services ensuring the functioning
of the Senate are divided into departments, divisions, services, bureaux, and
workshops.
The services of the Senate are thus conceived as to ensure the
fulfillment of the attributions specific to the institution and contribute to
the proper development of the legislative activity. To respond to those
exigencies, the services of the Senate are organised taking into account the
constitutional prerogatives of the institution, the requirements of the
legislative process and modern management criteria operating in the domain of
public institutions. The Senate of Romania has two large departments: the
Legislative Department and the Department for IT, Budget, Accounting and
Logistics. Those ones, in turn, are organised by divisions and services,
depending on their specific activity. The Secretary General subordinates three
autonomous divisions: the Division of the General Secretariat, the Foreign
Relations Division, and the Human Resources and Passports Division.
The Legislative Department is the expert structure providing a direct
support to the legislative activity, at each and every stage. The Legislative
Department organises and ensures the conditions for the works of the plenum and
the committees’ works, coordinates and controls the activity of the services
that complete the legislative acts in accordance with the norms of legislative
technique, and elaborate studies, syntheses, comparative analyses on issues
from the legislative field, delivering information, documentary syntheses and
other materials necessary to the legislative activity.
The staff employed in the Legislative Department ensures the expert assistance
for senators on legislative matters, both as organising and documentary basis.
In that respect, the experts of the department follow the path covered by bills
and legislative drafts, keep the evidence of the nominal composition of the
Senate’s Committees and that of the Parliament, of the parliamentary groups, of
the senators and of the changes that come up during the parliamentary office
and bring them to the knowledge of the Standing Bureau and the interested
services, deliver synthesis data on the legislative activity for the Standing
Bureau, Secretary General, press conferences organised in the Senate, and
whenever those might be asked for; they design and maintain the legislative
database in IT system; prepare and ensures the necessary conditions for the
proper development of the works of the Senate’s plenum.
At the same time, by its expert divisions, the Legislative Department
provides the senators, Standing Bureau and standing committees, parliamentary
groups and the other departments in the Senate, by their request, with
information, research syntheses, expert papers and other materials necessary to
the legislative activity; it elaborates studies, syntheses and comparative
analyses on legislative, economic, social matters, by the request of the
Standing Bureau, standing committees, parliamentary groups, head of department
or the Secretary General; elaborates comparative law analyses, by the request
of the Standing Bureau, parliamentary groups, standing committees, and the
Secretary General; manages the informative materials sent to the Senate by the
public institutions in the country, as well as the materials sent by
parliaments of other countries and international inter-parliamentary
institutions and elaborates bulletins and subject syntheses on those materials;
ensures the exchange of informing materials referring to the Senate’s
legislative and parliamentary activities with similar departments of other
countries’ parliaments.
The present structure of the Legislative Department gives the possibility
to the members of the Senate to have quick easy access to the legislative
information, at each and every stage, from the moment when the Senate is
notified with the bill to the stage when the normative act is published in the
Official Journal.
The working structures of the Senate, parliamentary groups and standing
committees, benefit by an expert tank that elaborates the documents of the
above mentioned and substantiates the adopted standpoints.
According to their sizes, the parliamentary groups establish their own
technical secretariats with a structure settled by the Standing Bureau. The
appointment and salaries of the secretariat’s members is established by order
of the Secretary General, with determined period labour contracts, during the
legislature. The appointment and dismissal of the staff working for the
parliamentary groups are done when proposed by the respective parliamentary
group.
From the material point of view, the parliamentary groups have the
necessary logistics in order to perform their activities, as well as transport
means, settled by the Standing Bureau in accordance with the size of the group.
In their turn, the standing and non-standing committees of the Senate
have at their disposal a technical secretariat and an expert tank, employed on
a undetermined period labour contract, and they contribute to the drawing up of
the specific documents and a good performance of their activities.
For exercising the senatorial mandate, the constituencies organize, for
each senator, a senatorial office, having as employed staff a head of
senatorial office, a driver and a secretary-typist, staff included in the
technical staff of the Senate. The employment of the senatorial office’s staff
is on a determined period labour contract, by the Secretary General of the
Senate, on the proposal of the respective senators. During their employment,
the staff is considered as temporarily detached, under the stipulations of
labour law. The labour contract of the senatorial office’s staff ceases on the
senator’s order or, when the holder of the mandate ceases to be a senator, on
the date when the new holder disposes.
The present organizational functional structure of the Senate,
corresponding to the present legislating concept, has the mission to increase
the share of the legislative activity within the standing committees, in order
to render the legislative process efficient in the plenum of the Senate, to
increase the role and quality of the staff’s activities and obviate the bad
functioning by laying stress upon homogeneity, flexibility and good
functioning, everything corroborated to optimize the informational flux of the
legislative process and the activity of the Senate’s experts involved in the
process.
Reorganising
the services of the Senate, in June 2003, has taken into account the experience
of other parliaments in this respect as well as the necessity of a structure as
close as possible to the Chamber of Deputies, starting from the equal
competencies of the two Chambers. Under the conditions when the Parliament
adopted the bill for the revision of the Constitution, which was validated by
popular referendum on the 19th of October this year, the partition
of the legislative powers of the two Chambers requires a revision of the
structure of the Senate's services, especially of those directly involved in
the legislative process, in order to better correlate them with the new
constitutional concept."