Comparative Lens: How Other Continental Parliaments Keep Their Rules in Line— and What PAP Can Take Home

By Olu Ibekwe

A Continental Parliament in Search of Equilibrium

Whenever a supranational legislature updates its standing orders, it meets the same paradox: rules must stay elastic enough for a living chamber yet rigid enough to honour the treaty that created it. The Pan-African Parliament (PAP) is merely the latest assembly to wrestle with this tension. A glance at comparable bodies that have already travelled the road—the European Parliament and two lighter regional forums—reveals a few habits that curb procedural drift without weakening treaty discipline.

Treaty discipline, in the PAP context, is the response—and legal duty—of treating the PAP Protocol as the supreme rule-book. Every lower norm is read through that lens, and any divergence is corrected at once. When that hierarchy becomes second nature, quarrels over tenure, budget, or mandate cool quickly, because the Protocol already decides the matter.

Brussels: The European Parliament’s Slow-but-Sure Step sequence

No trans-national chamber has amended its rule-book more often than the European Parliament (EP). Since the 1980s its Rules of Procedure have undergone dozens of rewrites, yet one principle never budges: the pen stays in parliamentary hands. A specialized Rules Committee drafts changes; political groups dissect every comma; only then does the full plenary vote—usually by absolute majority.

The Parliament’s in-house Legal Service may flag inconsistencies but may not table amendments of its own. When a deep clean is needed—most recently the 2024 “Parliament Reform Package”—revisions are bundled into a single omnibus text, placed on every Member’s desk in all EU languages, and subjected to a straight up-or-down vote. Tedious? Yes. But outsiders, however expert they may be, never usurp elected Members’ prerogative to write their own rules.

Geneva and Jakarta: What Lighter Forums Teach About Supremacy Clauses

Neither the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) nor the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Assembly (AIPA) wields binding legislative power, yet each enshrines treaty supremacy in plain words.

• IPU staggered four-year terms for its Executive Committee deliver renewal without perpetual electioneering.
• AIPA goes further: a one-sentence supremacy clause in its Statutes declares that any procedural rule conflicting with the founding Statutes is null ab initio. One line—yet it deters standing committees from smuggling in innovations beyond their bounds.

Why Treaty Discipline Matters So Much for PAP—A Midrand Reality Check

The past two years have handed PAP a brutal lesson in how quickly order collapses when treaty discipline falters. What began as a routine tussle—the 2021 rotation dispute and the 2023-25 Bureau-tenure standoff—snowballed into a full-blown institutional crisis once key actors brushed aside the Protocol’s supremacy. Most striking is the role of the Office of the Legal Counsel: mandated by Assembly/AU/Dec.757(XXXIII) (February 2020) to purge PAP’s Rules of inconsistencies—and, indeed, having done so in an October 2023 opinion— it later reversed course, endorsed the very breach it had condemned, and supplied the legal camouflage for it—a move that amounts to a dereliction of the duty the Assembly expressly entrusted to it. The consequences were stark: Rules suspended, competing legal memoranda flying, and months of paralysis that pulled Parliament away from its legislative and oversight work. The takeaway could not be clearer: whenever a secondary norm—be it an Executive-Council directive, a Bureau resolution, or a Secretariat circular—obscures the Protocol, PAP’s legitimacy bleeds and its political oxygen thins. Locking every future rule change to the Protocol is therefore not mere housekeeping; it is the entry price for credibility with Member States and African citizens alike.

Three Patterns That Keep Appearing

1. Legal offices diagnose, not draft. They highlight treaty conflicts but do not author substitute clauses.
2. Major revisions travel as a single package. A yes-or-no vote forces factions to weigh the whole bargain, preventing cherry-picking.
3. Radical transparency. Drafts circulate simultaneously in every working language, easing suspicion that footnotes disguise legal traps.

Translating the Lessons to Midrand

What do these patterns mean for the PRC Sub-Committee now revisiting PAP’s Rules?

• Keep the pen in Parliament. After the turbulence of 2023-25, PAP should remain the sole drafter of its rules, in line with Article 11.8 of the Protocol. The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) should run a red pen through treaty conflicts, then step back.
• Bundle the fixes. Let the November 2024 corrections—already included in PAP’s Activity Report and “taken note of” by the Executive Council—form the basis of one sealed package. A single vote will spare Members a year of serial tinkering.
• Write a bold supremacy clause up front. Make it Rule 2: “Wherever these Rules conflict with the PAP Protocol, the Protocol prevails.” AIPA’s single-line model has saved it countless hours of semantic wrangling.

Borrow—Don’t Copy-Paste

No two parliaments are identical. The EP’s committee machinery may feel ponderous in Midrand; during PAP’s 2022 amendment round, much work was instead driven by Regional Caucuses with the Rules Committee coordinating. Yet the instincts that travel well are clear: keep drafting power in elected hands, and foreground treaty supremacy.

If the PRC Sub-Committee weaves those instincts into its final alignment draft, PAP will do more than patch a tenure clause. It will future-proof its rule-book against the creeping uncertainties that have periodically paralyzed it. That, in the end, is the quiet gift of comparative study: not a foreign template to photocopy, but a tested set of habits that help a young legislature grow into its own best version of itself.