On Friday 3 February, the General Court of the EU annulled the decision made by the European Commission not to register the draft European citizen’s initiative “Minority SafePack – one million signatures for diversity in Europe”.
This draft initiative was introduced in July 2013 and called on the EU to improve the protection of people belonging to national and linguistic minorities and to strengthen cultural and linguistic diversity. In the Annex, draft acts are planned for twelve different areas, by the EU institutions. The citizen’s committee backing the proposal outlined the kinds of acts to be adopted, including their substance and corresponding legal bases.
It is this Annex that led to the decision of the Court (T-646/13). The reason given for the annulment is that the Commission refused to register the proposal in September 2013 in a very general way and argued that this proposal “manifestly fell” outside its powers “which enabled the Commission to submit a proposal for the adoption of an EU legal act for the purpose of implementing the Treaties”.
The Court argues that by proceeding in this way, the Commission failed to comply with its obligation to state the reasons by not indicating which of the measures among those set out in the annex to the proposed initiative did not come within its competence and by not setting out the reasons in support of that conclusion.
The citizen’s committee was therefore prevented from contesting the merits of that assessment, just as the Court is prevented from exercising its review of the legality of the Commission’s assessment.
In the absence of a full statement of reasons, the Court argued that a possible introduction of a new proposal, taking account of the Commission’s objections on the admissibility of certain proposals, by the authors of the original proposal would be seriously compromised. The Commission also, however, considered that some of the proposals included in the Annex could be admitted. Although it ultimately rejected the entire proposal, without subsequently taking into account the fact that some of the elements in it were valid, it was doing so on the principle that the regulation on the citizens' initiative (211/2011) did not contain any proviso for registering one or several parts of a draft initiative. Was this a correct interpretation of the regulation? The Court has left this question open. (Original version in French by Jan Kordys)