New York, May 21 (IPS) - The Secretary of the radical Transnational party called Friday for the United Nations to establish a permanent parliamentary assembly capable of bringing public expression more forcefully into the world body's affairs.

Emma Bonino, Italy's Deputy Parliamentary Speaker, told reporters she met with U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali this week and told him "it's not fair, and it's not viable to strengthen the United Nations' role by strengthening only the executive body and the governments" of member-nations.

The official of the Radical Party, which comprises some 500 parliamentarians in more than 40 countries, said she urged Boutros-Ghali to involve legislative power in some way. She suggested that parliamentarians could be involved in a permanent structure or assembly with consultative status, similar to the formation of the European Parliament.

That Assembly was at first selected by each member-nation's Parliament, not by direct elections, a policy the Radical chief said the United Nations might explore, Bonino heralded the European Parliament's initial achievements, noting that "frankly, they had only consultative power, but they played a big role in constructing a common view and a common sense - even if nowadays, that attitude, particularly toward the former Yugoslavia is a shame".

Bonino said that Boutros-Ghali and General Assembly President Stovan Ganev had been "actively interested" in the idea. This week's meetings between the self-described "non-violent Gandhian" politician and U.N. officials also touched on other proposed Radical Party reforms concerning national service and the death penalty, according to Bonino.

She advocated the implementation of multilateral civil service to replace national service in accordance with Article 13 of the U.N. charter, which calls for the strengthening of "preventive diplomacy". The Radical Transnational Party also called for all nations to abolish the death penalty.

Bonino said Boutros-Ghali will announce his intentions on the proposals at that party's next conference, to be held in Sofia, Bulgaria June 24-27. Bonino said she hoped support will grow for the reform proposal so that the United Nations could get behind "a New World Order, based on the rule of law, not the law of the jungle".

The latter, she believed, was prevailing in the disintegrated Yugoslav Republic, where the Radicals were among the first to condemn Serbia's expansionist aims against its new neighbours. She pointed to the semi-autonomous Yugoslav Republic of Kosovo, where Serb violations allegedly are increasing, as "exactly one of the examples where international law is lacking. There is a whole, it doesn't exist".

Bonino wants Kosovo an ethnic Albanian region where many Radical members are based to receive appropriate international monitoring and concern before the Serb-Muslim tensions in neighbouring Bosnia Herzegovina spill over into the state.

But she was not confident that the Kosovo issue, which she brought before the U.N, Department of Political Affairs this week, would lend itself to any easy resolution.

"It's a very difficult legal situation," she said. "They're not an autonomous country, so you cannot deploy peacekeeping corps there in accordance with the U.N. Charter. There is a real lack of concrete possibilities to address the problem."

The Radical chief came to New Yorl after a surge in her party's prestige in Italy, its strongest base. The recent "Tangentopolis" (Bribe City) scandals strengthened the Radical's hand, bringing 38,000 new members during the past few months in support of the party's call for electoral reform.

Italy's system of proportional election was scrapped in favour of a first-past-the-post system - a major Radical platform - in a nationwide referendum last month. Although that reform, ironically, may weaken the Radicals' parliamentary power, Bonino said here she is confident the change was the sort of structural reform Italy needed.

"The problem of my country has been "Partitocrazia" the invasion of political parties in civil life," she said. "My party has always been in favour of asserting democracy, and democracy means establishing somebody who has the responsability to rule and somebody else who has the responsibility to be in opposition. That didn't happen for 45 years in my country."