The Foreign Affairs ministers of Mercosur’s countries will be invited to participate into a meeting with Officers of Mercosur Parliament’s integrants (Parlasur) on October 18. On the agenda, there will be the deployment of the political agreement signed up last year by the four countries’ parliamentarians, which will allow setting the number of seats that each partner is entitled at the regional parliament – the idea is to split the vacancies up proportionally to population’s size.

The political agreement will just inure after being countersigned by Common Market Council, Mercosur’s highest organ, composed by the four countries’ ministers of Economy and Foreign Affairs. The Council should meet in Brazil in December.

The decision of formulating the invitation to the ministers was adopted during the Officer meeting occurred on Monday (13) in Montevideo. Through the meeting, parliamentarians hope to discuss the theme directly with the four ministers who will participate at the decision on it to be taken by the Common Market Council.
“It will be an emblematic moment, a milestone for Parlasur”, Senator Sérgio Zambiasi, who represented the Brazilian bench at the Bureau meeting, has predicted.

Argentine Proposal
During the meeting today, the Argentine parliamentary Mariano West presented a proposal in which, from January 1, 2011, the countries are represented according to the attenuated proportionality criterion – not yet with the definitive numbers to be adopted until 2014, or before that, in the case Venezuela, until it, joins the Bloc definitively.

The reference to Venezuela, whose admission has still depended on Paraguay’s Senate approval, occurs because Venezuelan parliamentarians’ presence would mitigate, in view of the other Bloc countries, the large Brazilian presence in Parlasur.

Parliamentarians who would be sworn in 2011, according to the Argentine proposal, would still be indicated by the Congresses of bloc integrants until direct elections occurred in each one of the countries.
As the countries would have different benches from January, West added, financial obligations would also start varying according to their sizes. "Deciding that in the next days is fundamental for defining Parliament's budget [for 2011]”, he affirmed.

With information from the Senate Agency.