Samdech, Your Royal Highnesses,
Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Today I have great pleasure and honor to join you all in the opening of the Stock-taking Conference of the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs and Inspection! This conference is indeed very important with the participation of Your Excellencies Chairmen of the Nine Committees and Secretaries General and Deputies of the National Assembly and Senate, the Leaders of the RGC’s Ministries and Institutions, as well as the management and staff of the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs and Inspection!
On behalf of the Royal Government of Cambodia and my own self, may I express my sincere congratulation and profound appreciation to all the participants of the conference, and to the management and staff of the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs and Inspection for your utmost efforts in organizing this conference!
Very shortly, the conference will take stock of the performance in the past and set new directions for our plan 2005, thus all our efforts will contribute to implementing the political platform of the 3rd mandate Royal Government of Cambodia who has introduced the Rectangular Strategy for Growth, Employment, Equity and Efficiency in Cambodia.
With the implementation of this very important strategy, it is required that all ministries/institutions, local authorities and the civil servants at all levels to participate and support this, with spirit of high responsibility.
However, while we are collectively mobilized to implement the strategy, it is also required to have a strict and close monitoring of the process whether it is on the right track? Thus, the RGC, in this sense, established the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs and Inspection as a government’s mechanism to strengthen the people’s awareness on laws and regulations, as well as to monitor law enforcement and implementation of the RGC’s policy agenda in order to strengthen good governance, adherence to and enforcing laws, thus finally increasing effectiveness in fighting corruption, eliminating the red-taps and reducing the poverty.
As it is the first time for me to participate in the conference of the ministry, I would like to share with the conference my common views on works in relation to parliamentary affairs and inspection as follows:
1. Parliamentary Affairs
The parliamentary affairs have greatly and actively contributed to implementing the RGC’s political platform, whose responsibility is not limited to the relations and coordination between local authorities and the RGC and between the RGC and the two legislative bodies, but also it involves drafting and facilitation and coordination in drafting laws and regulations ensuring the consistency with the Constitution of the Kingdom of Cambodia and effective use and coverage. More specifically, the RGC has tasked the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs and Inspection to review and improve the draft anticorruption law in order to incorporate additional legal provisions that the RGC has pledged with donor community, in the last CG meeting, to bring the law up to international standard.
The law dissemination presents an important task of the ministry who acts on behalf of the RGC to bring the laws and regulations to people across the country in order to enhance the respect for and enforcement of laws, thus reducing corruption and violation, enhancing social justice, creating culture of peace and non-violence, and strengthening the rule of laws and democracy.
2. Inspection
As I have raised earlier, if we want to get all the activities of ministries and institutions right, it requires close and strict monitoring. The term “inspection” means control, monitoring, survey or study on any activity or its performance in order to make an assessment on accountability and judgment on advantages or disadvantages. Moreover, conducting an inspection implies that ones contribute to curbing or fighting corruption, a key factor damaging the implementation of the RGC’s development policies.
Thus, inspection is an important task because any institution or leader shall manage to implement their policies or strategies they had introduced. Then, while implementing those they shall conduct monitoring or inspection to get feedbacks or warning for implementation. Thus, one would say “management requires inspection: no inspection, no management” or, in other word, “leadership requires review: no review, no leadership”.
So far, the Royal Government has introduced many strategies. If there has been no inspection, we cannot know how it is implemented, is there participation and support from the public, and what are the implications? Is the introduced policy relevant, does it need any improvement or not? In this sense, inspection serves as a link between management and public; it implies that “inspection serves as eyes and ears of management and close friend of subordinates”. Indeed, inspection is required by the Royal Government for all institutions for their long term and clear judgment on their performance, and using this as a tool for improvement and corrective measures on a timely and responsive basis.
Within this framework, I would like the conference concentrates on the role of inspection and should well assign, manage and strengthen inspection functions in order to enhance the performance of its unit for the firm progress of the Royal Government. In actual practices, both central and local levels of some institutions presently have not established inspection units, but some lack of staff to fulfill these tasks. The top level only inform the work of the lower level through the reports without acknowledge the different between reports and actual works. Moreover, complaints and defamations were never investigated or were incompletely investigated or were completely investigated without reports to the management. There are some works prolonged for months and years.
I hope that after this conference, your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen who are the heads of institutions, local authorities and heads of units will well acknowledge the important and special features of inspections and work hard to strengthen and expand its activities by assigning competent staff to implement these works well and efficiently.
Aforementioned, inspection is a hard work and requires high skills staff in term of competency, morality, experiences and organization. If the inspectors were incompetent, inexperienced and lack of clear sight knowledge, they would not able to fulfill these works since they cannot identify problems, analyze issues, make conclusion and evaluate those problems explicitly and implicitly. In this regard, the management lost their trust and those who being inspected were discontent. Nevertheless, if inspection staff were incompetent in checking and assessing the problems, it would create distrust and made up documents to conceal the truth. Competency, experiences and knowledge, therefore, are necessary to establish trustworthiness.
Also, characteristics and morality are important since competency inspector without good morality and behavior cannot do a well inspection which is honest and take time. Therefore, the development of inspection team preliminary required competency, experiences, knowledge, morality, good behavior, honest, hard-working, seriousness, struggling and patient. It is true that without hard-working, seriousness, struggling and patient, inspectors cannot attain the assigned works.
At the same time, inspection requires carefully and wisely consideration with clear planning and programs. The Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs and Inspection has to provide guidance to internal inspection and inspection of line ministries, institutions, secretariats, and units under its authority in their expertise, policies, circulations and government’s decisions in order to implement them effectively. In this spirit, the management has to clearly determine the most important works, assign staff to do inspection, and make appropriate assessments for the management to make a final decision avoiding blocking the other works which might affect the benefit of the nation and people. Truthfully, the complaint and defamation cases that the Ministry works hard to investigate can assure rights respecting, freedom, democracy and law enforcement. By doing a good inspection, people will put trust and hope.
Up to now, some ministries/institutions and units have never cooperated with inspection teams with some excuses and distrust the conclusions and evaluation of the inspectors. In this sense, All the ministries/institution and relevant units have to work cooperatively with inspection teams and provide required documents timely and openly.
The last remark that is also important is leadership is extremely necessary. As mentioned above, “Leadership is subject to inspection. If no inspection, it is not a leadership”. Talking about management, we should have planning, implementation, monitoring or constantly inspecting. With inspection, we would know the implementation match to the planning or not. Moreover, with inspection we would know how much we achieved and we found both good and bad experience as well as unexpected factors in order to timely adjust and take measure to implement.
Remarkably, even thought inspection teams work to inspect all works and level and is not judge, they help the management to make attain their objectives and in efficient manner. If the management team were unjust and the management lack of consideration, the solution would be inappropriate and lost its influence to other institutions. So, the inspection staff must be just, independence and cautious. We all known, the inspection staff is subjective while they are assigned to work at a specific, people there will connect and lobby them to do in their favor. Therefore, the inspection report contains untruth and unjust and this cases should avoid and carefully control. The most essential to avoid is the different comment of inspection team and its management. We had such case already while inspection staff’s recommendations were different to those provided by its management.
In short, inspections require participation and support from the leaders of the institutions to have a smooth work. The participation of people should be incorporated as a mechanism to inform the people. Therefore, inspection should employ the staff who are competence, experience, and knowledgeable with participation of the leaders of ministries/institutions and people.
To well precede the conference as planned and scheduled, I would like to ask all member of conference for comments and exchange idea and implement experience. Moreover, I would like to ask all ministries/institutions, provincial/municipal authorities and people cooperate and facilitate the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs and Inspections in legislations, law dissemination, linkage to morality education, and the links between legislation and execution as stated in sub-decree to establish the Ministry.
Before close and again, I would like to ask all ministries/institutions, provincial/municipal authorities and people cooperate and facilitate the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs and Inspections to fulfill its duties effectively. All ministries/institutions have to promote activities of general inspection department and inspection department in order to inform the progress to the leader on the implementation of staff and to take measures to timely fix the problems.
Finally, I wish Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen present in this conference with the five gems of Buddhist wishes.Now, I would like to declare an opening to the conference.
EndItem.
