TEHRAN – Deputy Parliament speaker Mohammad-Reza Bahonar has said that the Iranian Parliament has played a great role in promoting the country’s foreign diplomacy.

Despite the fact that executive power is separate from the legislative power preventing Majlis’s involvement in executive jobs, the parliament has so far worked hard in developing diplomatic ties with world parliaments through parliamentary diplomacy, Bahonar told the Mehr News Agency on Wednesday.
Majlis could help the administration to develop diplomatic ties with other countries and the sitting parliament has endeavored to contribute to help form friendship groups with different parliaments and hosting meetings of the Asian Parliamentary Assembly (APA)with the ultimate goal of establishing the Asian Parliament, said Bahonar who has served as lawmaker for nearly 23 years.
If the Asian countries could reach an agreement on the establishment of an ‘Asian Parliament’ the initiative could greatly impact multilateral ties between Asian governments and at the same time improve political and economic cooperation between Asian states, he underlined.
Te secretariat of APA is located in Iran and that has enhanced the number of diplomatic visits to the country, leading to a further improvement of ties with Asian states, he added.
The top lawmaker defended the foreign diplomacy of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s administration. However, he said the administration’s “aggressive” diplomacy in some areas has proved costly for the country.
“I should say that we have sustained a series of losses at times.”
Parliament should ratify laws to make parties answerable
Bahnor recommended that the best strategy for having active parties is ratifying specific laws.
The legislative power should clearly define what it expects from parties and in the same vein recognizes the legal rights of parties, he commented.
Today, a lack of transparent undertakings concerning political parties is due to the nonexistence of a mutual undertaking between the legislature and parties themselves, the MP noted.
He also said the main mistake of the reformists following last June presidential election was that they stepped out of the legitimate and legal lines, causing grave losses to the country.
Commenting on the probability of the elimination of reformists from the political scene, Bahonar said that it is naïve to think that reformists would be completely vanished from the political sphere despite their past mistakes.
Although compensating for those losses might be difficult or impossible this does not mean that it would be an end to their political activities, he explained.
In the events that followed last year’s presidential election, an environment of extremism and radicalism overshadowed Iran’s politics and “I should say that all such radical approaches was in fact wrong.”
The post-election atmosphere was not at all based on rational thinking and ‘reason’ was replaced by muscle flexing, he lamented