06/12/2010

European Citizens' Initiative
Enabling EU citizens to take part in shaping EU policies

By Marion Jeanne, French Press Adviser

What is the European Citizens' Initiative?

The European Citizens' Initiative is a major innovation of the Lisbon Treaty. With this new instrument, one million citizens from a significant number of Member States can ask the European Commission to propose a new EU law on a topic of interest to them, provided it falls within the areas the EU can legislate in, thus bringing Europe closer to its citizens.

For Alain Lamassoure (EPP, France) and Zita Gurmai (S&D, Hungary) the two Co-Rapporteurs of the European Parliament's Constitutional Affairs Committee, far from being a threat to the European Parliament or other institutions' powers, the European Citizens' Initiative will on the contrary complement them and contribute to bridging the gap between the EU and its citizens by enabling the EU decision-making process to become more democratic.
Until now, many concrete problems faced by the EU citizens in their daily lives have not been addressed by the EU institutions. For the Co-Rapporteurs, the European Citizens' Initiative will provide them with a means to be heard.

What is the European Parliament's role?

When it comes to the European Parliament itself, even though it will not play a formal role in the procedure, it will be able to support the European Citizens' Initiatives of its choice through the organisation of hearings or the adoption of resolutions and it intends to make full use of these powers.

What are MEPs pushing for?

Convinced that the European Citizens' Initiative can only be a success if it is a peoples' instrument, so that the citizens with fully benefit from it, the Co-Rapporteurs aimed to simplify the citizens' initiative and make it as user-friendly as possible.

Their line was unanimously supported by the Members of the Constitutional Affairs Committee Tuesday 30 November.

The main points of MEPs' demands are the following:

• The Admissibility check on an initiative should be made at the point of registration, not after 300 000 signatures have been collected - as originally proposed by the European Commission - to avoid unnecessary efforts or waiting by those who have signed an initiative.



• Citizens' committees, composed of at least 7 European citizens from 7 different Member States, should be set up to register an initiative. The constitution of such a committee will enable the organisers to focus on truly European issues and will ease the collection of signatures in the required number of Member States.



• The minimum number of Member States which the signatories should come from should be lowered. The original proposal was one third. MEPs and Member States found an agreement on one fourth.



• MEPs want personal data protection to be guaranteed by making sure that only the data strictly necessary to verify the signatures will be required, so as not to discourage people from supporting an ECI.



• The launching, organisation and signature of the Citizens' initiative will be limited to natural persons (individuals). Legal persons (NGOs, governmental organisations, associations, companies, churches...) will be able to actively take part in the promotion of initiatives provided that they do so in the strictest transparency.



• The European Commission will have to provide the organisers with free-of-charge, open-source software to help them collect signatures online, but also a user's guide and a point of contact.



• The European Commission should commit itself to organising, jointly with the European Parliament, a public hearing on the topic of the submitted text if the text has received at least a million signatures.

Next steps

Members of the Constitutional Affairs Committee will vote on the final agreement with the European Council, their co-legislator, on 13 December. MEPs will debate the Citizens' Initiative on Wednesday 15 December in Strasbourg and vote on it on 16 December.

But, in the end, the success of a European Citizens' Initiative will rely on the citizens and on their capacity to stand up to the challenge and launch successful initiatives!