The Parliament SEARCHLIGHT

Supported by Open Society Institute, during last year, Populari developed a portal named “Parliamentary SEARCHLIGHT”, a structured, fully indexed, and easily readable database of BiH State-level legal acts and legislative processes of the Parliamentary Assembly of BiH (BiH Parliament).

The portal searchlight.populari.org visualizes this information and provides a full insight into the legislative processes taking place at the BiH Parliament.

The system is designed to provide a full access to the entire body of BiH state-level legislation and to enhance transparency of the legislative processes taking place within the two houses of the BiH Parliament.

The project set out to complete the following policy goals:

• To create a database of BiH legislation;
• To create a structured, fully indexed, and easily readable database of BIH Parliament sessions’ transcripts and voting results;
• To map out the links between the Parliamentary processes taking place and the legislation resulting out of those processes;
• To program an engine that will be able to automatically fetch from the Internet the information necessary to keep the databases up to date.

The project has completed these originally set policy goals as well as the following additional goals:

• Develop legislative timelines enabling the user to visualize the processes that yielded current legislation;
• Provided summary and aggregate statistics and visualized information about the adopted legislation, parliamentary activities, voting and more;
• Provided fully indexes and searchable database of the European Union Policy Areas, the EU negotiation chapters and to the Acquis (EUR-lex) with links to the corresponding BiH legislation and to the information on the Parliamentary legislative processes;
• Created a search engine to enable the public to quickly locate legislation and parliamentary information.