On The Inquiry Right In The Supervision Of The Local People’s Congress

Inquiry means that the constituting personnel of the representative institutions address inquiries to the government and other State organs in accordance with the regulations of the constitution and law, and requires that the inquired objects should give response to the inquired questions according to law within the legal time limit. The system of addressing inquiries has originally appeared in Britain and it has been generated based on the maturity of a series of theories such as the parliamentary system of people’s sovereignty, representative government and restraint of power etc. After 200 years’ development, the system of addressing inquiries has become one of the significantly important components in the national representative parliamentary supervision and also the daily important means of the majority of parliamentary system national congress and senators in western countries supervising governmental work.China is a country of the National People’s Congress system and all rights belong to people. NPC members elected by the People’s Congress implement the supervising rights instead of people. On account of China’s specific political, economic and cultural system, inquiry rights in the supervision right of China’s People’s Congresses include inquiry, addressing inquiries and special inquiries. In a word, foreign “addressing inquiries” equals China’s “inquiry rights”.With over 30 years’ great efforts, China’s inquiry right has experienced the initial, developing and improving stage in the legislation, and currently it is still required being further improved. Just being one method of the local NPC implementing the supervision right, the inquiry and supervision wins certain effectiveness in the practice of supervision. And it also guarantees the masses of people’s legitimate rights and interests. However, from the perspective of construction of democratic and legal system’s requirement, the inquiry rights of local NPC still need to be further improved and perfected. From the view of practice, no matter of the quantity or quality of using inquiry rights, the local NPC does not play its function and effectiveness that it should have during the process of supervision. The reason for it is not only the cause of the laws and the design of procedures, but also the one that of the representative quality, performance level and traditional concept of culture.Because of the differentiation between state system and political system, China and the western countries with a parliamentary system have two totally different ways on the development of representative parliamentary institutions and so as the system and regulations of the relative inquiry rights. However, it still has significant referencing meaning to improve China’s inquiry rights according to the analysis and comparison of the parliamentary foreign inquiry system. It requires that we should make efforts from all aspects to improve the inquiry rights on the supervision of China’s local NPC; it not only needs to modify the defects of law, but also needs to make the relative procedural regulations perfect as well as strengthen people’s democratic concept of law and improve the representative of NPC’s quality.In this paper, it starts from the basic theory of inquiry to analyze the problems and causes that China’s local NPC has when they implement the inquiry rights, and proposes that it should improve the legal norms and the quality of the representative of NPC and perfect the inquiry rights implementing supporting system through taking the perfect experience of inquiry system in western parliamentary countries as reference so as to further improve the inquiry rights of the local NPC in the supervision, make the inquiry rights of China’s local NPC Standing Committee be implemented better, carried out properly and played its whole function.