A new tool for citizen participation in EU agenda

A new tool for citizen participation in EU agenda setting was created when the Lisbon Treaty came into force in December 2009. Article 11.4 created the ‘European Citizens Initiative’ (ECI), which allows 1 million citizens of the Union to request that the Commission makes a legislative proposal to the other institutions.

It took 12 months of inter-institutional wrangling to agree on the regulation that will govern the ECI, including how long organisers will have to collect the 1 million signatures (12 months) and how much data people will have to give to authenticate their signature.

On 27 March, a conference was held in Brussels to discuss how citizen groups can take hold of the ECI tool and start to use it successfully. It was organised by the European Citizen Action Service (ECAS), and aimed to get answers from all types of stakeholders to questions such as whether the ECI regulation lives up to expectations and whether it will be user friendly.

Gerald Häfner, a German MEP and Rapporteur on ECI pointed out that the regulation which has been agreed for the ECI is a compromise between very different interests. He said, and many agreed with him throughout the day, that only time and experience will tell whether it will improve EU democracy in the direction of a Union that people feel attached to, or aggravate the feeling of disconnection, and the consequent frustration.

Indeed, the ECI will now be a learning process for both sides. For the EU institutions especially the European Commission (EC), they will now have to listen to some citizen proposals, and they have not wanted to do that. Right up to the end of the negotiations on the regulation the EC fought to abandon the plan to hold a hearing in the European Parliament on all successful ECIs.

However civil society will also need to learn how the process works, what is the tool useful for, when is best time to it according to international agendas, and for what themes.

A panel of actors from the academic, civil society, EU institution and national government spheres considered the question of how user-friendly the regulation was. Carsten Berg, director of ECI Campaign, at Democracy International highlighted his concern that the ECI debate has underestimated the size of the task of collecting 1million signatures. It really means at least collecting about 20% more because experience shows that about 20% will be invalid signatures.

Giving personal data like passport number for identification purposes goes against the culture of many countries and formal requirements such as this in the regulation will cut the number of people who will be prepared to get involved. Michaela Glöckler who has been involved in ECI type actions (see Aktion Eliant) agreed, saying that it can sometimes take up to 10 minutes to persuade someone just to sign their name, so any information will certainly increase the difficulty of this task. In some countries, such as Germany, there already exist such direct democracy instruments without such high criteria for identification, and many people at the conference wondered whether this regulation was overly stringent.

Marc Pecsteen, who was in charge of European Affairs during the Belgian Presidency of the EU last year explained that it had been clear that the 27 member states would not reach agreement on a simpler type of signature authentification. This is why the consensus was achieved around a double list - in nine countries there is a simpler requirement, while the other 18 countries require more stringent proofs of id.

An EU official in charge of Institutional Issues at the Secretariat General of the European Commission, Mário Tenreiro, said that, reading the regulation, it sounds complicated. But he said that the EC is setting itself the task of making it user friendly and not off putting for organisers or potential signatories. He said that there should be automatic processes, with online software. The aim is to design a smooth and simple process and put all in place to facilitate it. Many speakers throughout the day made the point that it is in the interest of all stakeholders that the first ECIs are admissible and not controversial. This will increase the credibility of the instrument.

But many still pointed out important pitfalls, such as the lack of any real help desk for organisers, which various citizen groups lobbied for. There is only a contact point, so there is no clear focal point, somewhere organisers can get legal advice, practical (such as) campaign advice, some translation rights.

An afternoon workshop session chaired by Andrew Duff, a British MEP specialised in constitutional issues of the EU examined the question of the long term impact of ECI. The atmosphere in the workshop was fairly skeptical overall.

A Research Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies think tank (CEPS), Piotr Kaczyński, pointed out that in any case, the Commission retains has full control over the legislative process. He pointed out the opportunity we now have to develop a EU level public sphere, for common debate across the Union. But currently the only obligation on the Commission is to publish a communication responding to the successful ECI. Clearly we cannot expect that expect all 500m citizens will read that. If we want a European public sphere it can’t be one-sided communication, and Mr Kaczyńsky said that if this is not handled well it could be counterproductive.

Janice Thomson of the UK based citizen engagement organisation Involve said that the ECI was really a very small tool dealing with agenda setting, she underlined that it is not really a tool for deliberation. However she saw it as a positive development because for the first time it is creating a real space for citizens. She recalled that in the EU there has been a lot of opposition to real citizen-friendly involvement such as this. The opposition may have been hidden or coded, but it has been present and that is because people involved in were worried about changing the status quo.

Ms Thomson thought that the ECI followed the political zeitgeist, referring to a generational change in political behaviour and citizen engagement including falls in voting rates, and in political party membership. People are gravitating more towards issue-based campaigning, demonstrations etc, which is exactly how the ECI is structured.  But she thought that the biggest barrier to success is the EU leaders’ current attitude towards citizens.

Refering to this point, Andrew Duff mentioned again that ECI hearings have been forced on the Commission which is great. He said that we now have an EC which more opportunistic than for many years past. The absence of strategic planning is quite marked, and it is struggling to have the self confidence to drive agenda of EU. Mr Duff hoped that the presence of the ECI could reverse this trend, and guide us towards a more technical Commission restored to some of its more classical self confidence as a political actor.

Frank Castenholz of the Representation of the Bremen region highlighted the fact that many commentators belive that the ECI could legally bring about Treaty changes. He pointed out that the treaties have a political agenda built into them; they are not neutral like national constitutions. If it is not possible to change them, then it means citizens are only allowed to have an initiative within a pre-established political agenda, which is not very democratic. Andrew Duff said that he would welcome a case at the European Court of Justice on the question of whether ECIs calling for treaty revision are acceptable, because he thinks the court would tend to rule to make this possible.

The conference and workshops raised various other questions, including how organisers of ECI should keep their campaigns going past the collection of the signatures, and what the tool would mean for other bodies of the EU such as the EESC. If you wish to receive a copy of the full report, please contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

You can also find further information on line at the ECAS site.