Important committee meetings in the state parliament should also be broadcast live on the internet in the future – after Corona. In view of stubborn resistance, especially in the CSU, not all meetings are to be streamed and not all of them, but all reports from ministers including discussions, all expert hearings and technical discussions. This was announced by the CSU and Free Voters on Thursday in Munich. Most recently, the coalition had blocked the continuation of the live broadcasts of committee meetings that had been established since the beginning of the Corona crisis.
The new regulation should come into force after the Pentecost holidays at the latest. All meeting rooms in the state parliament are to be gradually equipped with the necessary permanently installed video technology. Apart from the live transmissions on the Internet, certain people should also be able to connect to the meetings in principle and continuously: representatives of the state government, civil servants, experts, journalists from the Bavarian state press, employees of the state parliament office and the parliamentary groups. Petitioners, on the other hand, must in principle appear in the state parliament again in the future. In the future, it should only be possible to connect to the state parliament if, for serious reasons, it is “not possible or only possible under unreasonable conditions”.
It is about ensuring transparency and publicity on the one hand and maintaining the working atmosphere in the committees on the other, argued the parliamentary directors Tobias Reiß (CSU) and Fabian Mehring (Freie Wahler). Members of Parliament must generally be present in person. “Democracy cannot be organized from the home office,” said Reiß.
At the end of March, the CSU and Free Voters, with their majority in Parliament, rejected a motion by the Greens, SPD and FDP to enable citizens to permanently monitor the entire committee work digitally. The state parliament has recently returned to the pre-corona state. The CSU and Freie Wahler had already announced a compromise at the time.