Brussels, 15/12/2010 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday 15 December in Strasbourg, the European Parliament definitively approved the agreement negotiated on 30 November with the Council and the Commission on the regulation for implementing the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI). The text will be formally adopted by the Council in the next few days and will enter into force on 1 January 2011. Member states and the Commission will subsequently have 12 months to set up the relevant administrative structures for applying the regulation.
Representatives from the three institutions who were at the European Parliament warmly welcomed what one of the four co-rapporteurs of the EP, Alain Lamassoure (EPP, France), had described as “the opening up of the EU to participatory democracy”. Citizens will now have the same right of political initiative as the Council and the EP, explained Lamassoure. Olivier Chastel, the representative of the Belgian Presidency of the EU Council of Ministers, claimed that this development was the first of its kind in the world, insofar as it involves, “participatory democracy at a supranational level”. EP rapporteurs - as well as Lamassoure - included Zita Gurmai (S&D, Hungary), Diana Wallis (ALDE, United Kingdom) and Gerald Häfner (Greens/EFA) - who all said that the Parliament had finally succeeded in significantly improving the Commission's initial proposal (“we rewrote two thirds of the text”, Häfner even affirmed, particularly to make the procedure “simpler, more accessible and more transparent”. For example, ensuring the registration of an ECI on the Commission website and verifying its admissibility will be carried out in a single procedural stage. This will not, however, compel those behind an ECI to first collect 300,000 (according to the Commission proposal) or 100,000 signatures (Council). The only requirement will be for seven people from seven different member states to support an ECI and set up a “citizens' committee”, as stipulated in the regulation. All citizens that have the nationality of a member state and have reached the legal age for voting in European elections can support an ECI. In order for an initiative to succeed, it must have the support of one million citizens from at least a quarter (25%) of member states. On this point as well, the EP brought the initially proposed threshold down (a third). Finally, the EP succeeded in ensuring that any ECI which has been able to collect one million signatures is able to have a public hearing at the European Parliament with the participation of the Commission, even if the Commission decides not to follow up the demand of this ECI and introduce a legislative proposal. Any citizen, organisation, political party, lobby, institution, company or church etc will be able to support an ECI politically and financially “but on the condition of there being total transparency”, concluded Lamassoure. For the Belgian Presidency, the ECI is a great victory just before it hands over the reins of the rotating presidency. Implementation of this “flagship innovation in the Lisbon Treaty”, which aims to introduce greater inclusiveness for EU citizens, is a priority, explained Olivier Chastel.
The GUE/NGL welcomed the agreement on the ECI but would have liked to have introduced a few “improvements” to the regulation (the amendments submitted by the group were rejected). The group therefore proposed that the regulation be extended to all residents of the EU and not only to EU citizens. Helmut Scholz MEP said that he would return to this question when the regulation was revised in three years' time.
The petition on GMOs is not the first ECI. During a press conference that followed the vote, Commissioner Maros Šefèoviè gave his response to a question regarding the “petition” submitted by the Avaaz and Greenpeace NGOs (which obtained more than one million signatures) demanding a moratorium on authorisation for new genetically modified organisms (GMOs) but which was not considered as an ECI. The commissioner said that this petition is certainly “politically very important” and would be subject to serious examination and carefully studied by the Commission but that at a legal level, it could not be treated as an ECI because the regulation establishing the rules is not yet in force. The Commission defends “the general European interest” and must therefore enforce a strictly legalistic approach on this point, insisted the commissioner. By launching this petition at the time that negotiations on the ECI regulation were still taking place, the NGOs had willingly taken this risk, Diana Wallis explained. Gerald Häfner appealed for the approach to be more political than legalistic. He said that citizens' petitions that succeeded in obtaining one million signatures should be taken into very serious political consideration, even if they do not yet fulfil the legal criteria of an ECI. (H.B./transl.fl)