On Wednesday 13 September, the European Commission adopted a proposal to review the regulation on the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI).
The ECI offers one million EU citizens the possibility to invite the Commission to submit a legislative proposal. However, it is far from delivering the desired results. Since April 2012, 47 initiatives have been registered. Three initiatives have reached the one million signature threshold. A fourth initiative has also reached this threshold and the signatures are currently being verified before it is submitted. Two of the three successful Initiatives are being acted upon by the Commission – Right2Water and Stop Vivisection.
European Commission First Vice-President Frans Timmermans presented the proposal on Friday 15 September (see other article) and said that thus far the ECI has had "very relative success". It needs to be improved, he said, so that citizens can meet with European democracy more often – not only every five years.
In answering a question from the press, Timmermans admitted that he did not expect this proposal to lead to "an explosion of European democracy and citizens' involvement". He said it was too difficult at the current time to bring everyone around an ECI and to communicate it and involve people. However, the Commission is trying to improve the situation.
"We have been encouraged by the Court of Justice to provide better service on the ECI", he said. The new proposal will thus enable partial registration if one or several parts of the initiative are clearly outside the Commission's competences and if these parts do not include the main objectives of the initiative, Timmermans stated. "We rejected the ECI on Brexit, but overall the ECI has unexploited potential", he said.
The Commission also proposes to harmonise the minimum age required to support an initiative, and to lower it to 16 years old from 18. There will then be 10 million European young people who can contribute.
Other changes to be introduced are that: - organisers will be able to ask questions directly to the Commission before registering their initiative, and they will be able to consult other organisers through a collaborative platform made available by the Commission. They will also be able to ask advice at local level, in their member state, or contact points will be set up. The partial registration of an initiative will be possible; - the timeframe for gathering statements of support remains fixed at 12 months. However, organisers will now be able to choose the date at which this period starts, in the three months following the registration of the initiative; - organisers will now be able to use a central online collection system managed by the Commission, which will be made available to them free of charge (the statement of support can be made using electronic identification); - organisers and the Commission will also be able to collect the email addresses of signatories of the ECI in order to keep them informed of the initiative's progress; - the proposal will reduce the amount of personal data that citizens must provide; - all EU citizens living outside their country of origin will be able to exercise their right to support an ECI because participation is based on nationality in the new system (and not on nationality and country of residence, as in the past).
In addition, the assessment phase will increase from three to five months in order to grant more time to the debate. The Commission will meet organisers within one of month of the initiative being presented; the public hearing at the European Parliament will be organised within three months and will enable fair representation of all the stakeholders, other EU institutions and consultative bodies. The Commission will respond to the initiative in the form of a communication within five months, instead of within three months as currently.
See: http://bit.ly/2f0Z1gN (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)