Fadel Abdulghany
Ministers can answer all the questions posed by parliament, and yet their performance remains beyond any actual oversight. The answers may appear complete in form, yet they cannot be verified; the figures may be accurate in themselves, yet they are selected in a manner that conceals the areas of failure. In such cases, the problem does not lie in the limited powers of parliament as much as it lies in its lack of an independent basis through which it can assess the information presented to it. Thus, if the only detailed records on the performance of a ministry are those prepared by the ministry itself, the hearing becomes a test of the ability of the minister to answer with composure and confidence, more than it is a means of verifying the accuracy of what he says.
Parliamentary oversight is a legal competence, and it is an institutional capacity as well. Constitutional texts grant parliament the powers to request documents, hold hearings, and approve budgets; however, they do not address, to the same extent, the human resources, the technical knowledge, and the access to information that are necessary to exercise these powers. A parliamentary committee that receives hundreds of pages of expenditure records, without possessing the tools necessary to analyze them, has obtained the information in form, yet it remains dependent, in substance, on the body that provided it. Thus, compliance with legal procedures can coexist with weak actual oversight, and the strength of a parliament cannot be judged on the basis of the powers stipulated in the constitution alone.
From Power to Capacity: The Conditions of Evidence-Based Oversight
The core problem is the information asymmetry between the executive and legislative authorities. It is the ministries that design programs, keep administrative records, and often commission evaluations of their own performance. When parliament relies on these materials alone, it tends to adopt the definition of the problem by the government, the indicators the government uses to measure performance, and its narrative on the extent of the success of its policies. A ministry may announce, on the basis of correct data, that spending on a certain service has increased, while an independent evaluation poses a different question: has the level of the service provided actually improved? Both findings may be correct, but each of them measures a different thing. Independence here does not necessarily mean that the information comes from outside state institutions; a parliamentary research service, an independent audit body, or administrative records that parliament obtains in accordance with the law can perform this role, alongside universities, professional associations, and specialized civil society organizations. The essential criterion here is that parliament possesses the capacity to test the claims of ministries without relying exclusively on them, and without presuming in advance the accuracy of the information of the government or of that provided by external parties.
It is necessary to distinguish between expertise and evidence, since the availability of either of them alone is not sufficient to achieve actual accountability. A research center may possess reliable data, yet lack the knowledge necessary to identify which ministerial decisions should be subjected to scrutiny on the basis of that data. A discrepancy in the reported spending figures may reveal an error, a difference in accounting standards, or a misuse of funds; however, it does not by itself prove any of these possibilities. The research literature shows how easily the stage of critical assessment of evidence is bypassed. A systematic review conducted by Mathieu Ouimet and his colleagues on the use of research evidence in legislatures concluded that the symbolic or tactical use of research was the most frequently observed pattern. The review also identified the presence of specialized research staff in parliamentary committees as a factor that facilitates the use of evidence, while the unavailability of information in a timely manner constitutes a barrier to it. As for a study conducted by Marc Geddes on the committees of the British House of Commons, it showed that its participants, from among MPs and parliamentary staff, attached great importance to achieving balance among the persons whose testimonies are heard; however, this criterion differs from the criterion of the quality of the evidence they provide.
Therefore, real reform begins from within the parliamentary institution before resorting to external parties. A committee that turns to external consultants on every technical matter may do no more than shift its dependence from the executive authority to the organizations it chooses to invite. As for the establishment of a permanent research service, staffed by specialized professional cadres and serving the members of the Assembly regardless of their political orientations, it enables parliament to compare sources, detect what the information presented to it has omitted, and build a cumulative institutional knowledge of public policy areas. External expertise is most useful when parliament is able to commission specialized bodies with precisely defined tasks, and to assess the findings they present in an independent manner.
The selection of participants in hearings raises another problem. Technical competence does not grant its holder a mandate to speak on behalf of a particular group or social category, just as direct experience provides evidence that specialized analysis cannot replace. A hearing on conditions of detention may need legal and medical experts, alongside the testimonies of persons who were previously detained. Nevertheless, the inclusion of the various parties remains a matter separate from the reliability of the evidence presented. Hearing from a wide spectrum of participants enhances procedural legitimacy; as for determining what their testimonies and evidence prove, it is a separate analytical task, and the diversity of participants does not mean that all claims must be given the same evidentiary weight. Likewise, requiring complete freedom from interests is not a realistic standard; the practical standard consists of the disclosure of interests, the adoption of transparent criteria for selecting participants, and the subjection of their methodologies to independent assessment. When the submissions or statements presented rely on information collected from victims and witnesses, enabling parliament to access them must not turn into the exposure of their identities or the disclosure of confidential records relating to them.
Accountability also requires distinguishing between functions that are often conflated. Oversight means the examination of the actions and decisions of the government; answerability requires officials to explain and justify those actions and decisions; as for responsiveness, it concerns the extent of the willingness of institutions to correct information or modify their practices, while sanction consists of the consequences that the law permits to be imposed on the basis of what accountability reveals. Evidence contributes primarily to strengthening oversight and the capacity to require officials to provide explanations; as for its transformation into an institutional response, it depends on the cooperation of the government, political incentives, institutional powers, and follow-up mechanisms. A study conducted by Benton and Russell on the select committees of the British House of Commons concluded that the influence of these committees is complex and often indirect; hence, limiting the measurement of their impact to the number of recommendations that the government agreed to implement does not reflect their full influence. One possible pathway of influence is that ministries modify their behavior when they anticipate that their claims will be subjected to scrutiny and verification, an anticipation that is reinforced when hearings are part of continuous parliamentary inquiries, not separate procedures that end with the end of the session.
The Syrian Case: Oversight Without Sanctions on an Incomplete Information Base
In Syria, these distinctions are of particular importance in light of the existing constitutional framework. Under the Constitutional Declaration issued on March 13, 2025, the powers of the People’s Assembly include holding hearings with ministers and approving the general budget. In contrast, the President of the Republic, in accordance with Article 35, has the sole authority to appoint ministers and dismiss them from their posts, without the Assembly having any role in approving their appointment. Nor does the Constitutional Declaration provide for a parliamentary mechanism for granting or withdrawing confidence. Accordingly, hearings can impose on ministers a duty to provide answers and explanations; however, they do not grant the Assembly the authority to impose sanctions on them. This is what increases the importance of relying on evidence, because the legislative and budgetary decisions of the Assembly, its recommendations, and any referral of the findings of its work to the competent authorities are more solid and more defensible when they are based on facts and information that have been verified.
This difficulty is compounded in the Syrian transitional phase for two reasons: the first is that parliament lacks the information held by the executive authority, and the second is that the information available to the executive authority itself is incomplete. The general budget illustrates both problems. The Ministry of Finance presented the 2026 budget publicly in April, before the People’s Assembly convened in July. After the standing committees were named, a member of the Assembly stated that the Assembly had not yet reviewed that budget, nor the operational and development plans of public entities. When the Budget and Accounts Committee met with the Director of the General Budget at the Ministry of Finance in October, it discussed the legal status of the 2026 budget and the procedures necessary for its approval. The Ministry explained that it operates according to the rule of provisional spending on a one-twelfth basis of the budget, and it also spoke of the difficulties hindering the completion of the final accounts. Where the government holds information that parliament does not possess, independent expertise helps to verify that information; as for where records are incomplete on both sides, it helps to rebuild the information and evidentiary base necessary for exercising oversight.
The internal rules of procedure adopted on July 30, 2026, provide tools that can be utilized in performing both tasks, bearing in mind that the authoritative text is the official one published in the Official Gazette. With this caveat in mind, the rules appear to include provisions on providing research support to the Assembly, allowing persons from outside it to attend committee meetings pursuant to a decision, and hearing the testimonies of persons and experts within the framework of the inquiries conducted by temporary committees, in addition to separate procedures for holding hearings with ministers. These are procedurally distinct arrangements; permission to attend does not in itself create a right to give testimony, hearing testimonies requires a separate procedural basis, and none of these arrangements transfers the power to direct questions to ministers from the members of the Assembly to external experts.
At the practical level, parliamentary committees can obtain ministerial documents before hearings are convened, commission independent bodies to evaluate them, and draw on parliamentary analysts to distinguish between the facts supported by corroborating evidence and those that remain disputed, then return in subsequent sessions to the issues that were not settled. The success of this process is measured by the extent to which the discrepancies and contradictions in the information are examined, and by whether the explanations provided by officials have become more specific and precise.
Drawing on independent expertise does not diminish parliamentary responsibility, nor does it grant the People’s Assembly powers it does not possess. The members of the Assembly remain responsible for determining the questions that should be posed, assessing what the evidence proves, and formulating the appropriate recommendations. However, independent expertise expands the information and evidentiary base on which their decisions rest, and makes those decisions more amenable to examination, review, and correction, thereby strengthening oversight of ministers and the informed exercise of the legislative and budgetary powers of the Assembly. A parliament that relies on the narrative of the executive authority to evaluate the performance of the executive authority itself can hold hearings; however, it cannot independently verify the accuracy of what is presented to it.
