The next ECI-hearing in the European Parliament will be organized by Gerald Häfner and can be followed by the live-stream on Wednesday (12 May 2010) in the afternoon from 14h30 to 17h15.

As you know, the European Commission issued its draft regulations to implement the European Citizens Initiative (ECI) in late March. These regulations are currently being examined by the European Parliament and Council.

At this critical moment for the ECI, we strongly encourage you to contact your Member(s) of European Parliament (MEP), in your native language, to urge him or her to support more citizen-friendly ECI regulations.

• Key points for you to stress in your letters, e-mails and phone conversations with MEPs
• Contact information for all MEPs can be found on the European Parliament website www.europarl.europa.eu

Within these months the EU-instutions will decide about the fate of ECI. Will we actually get a citizen-friendly and workable ECI with the consequence of many successful ECIs to come within the next years? Or will it be an unuseable instrument due to too high restrictions? On the ECI-hearing on Feb 22nd the Commission remained quite hermetic and did not reveal in how far they are ready to change their Green Book proposals.

On 24 March, the European Parliament will debated the ECI between 15:00 – 24:00
The official title was: “Council and Commission statements * Development of the European Citizens Initiative based on Article 11(4) of the Treaty on European Union.”

You can watch the EP plenary session (as well as committee meetings) live on the internet on the Europarl TV website. Afterwards, you can watch plenary archives on the EP website.

If you have suggestions or any concrete ideas how to influence the process in an intelligent and fruitful way, feel free to contact us. Now is the time to act.

Given the importance of the “European Citizens’ Initiative” introduced by the Lisbon Treaty, the Commission has opened a broad public consultation in order to seek the views of all interested parties on how the citizens’ initiative should work in practice.

The European Commission has invited respondents to the Green Paper to a Stakeholder Hearing, which will take place on 22nd February in Brussels.

• Programme
• The complete hearing is available here

Today the dead-line for turning in ECI-proposals to the EU-Commission is over and several people and NGOs of you have contributed. Thank you very much for getting into the details and creating your own ideas! You can view all proposals here.

Based on many informal meetings with the responsible persons of the EU-Commission within the last weeks and based on the turned in written proposals by civil society organisations, we hope that the EU-Commission is getting a sense of understanding, that there actually still is a strong need to improve the proposals made by the EU-Commission in the Greenbook. Thus, let us undertake the next steps, in order to achieve a citizen-friendly design of the European Citizens’ Initiative, so that ECI will truly be an accessible and workable instrument for us as citizens. There still is a lot to do. More…

The Treaty of Lisbon opens up the possibility for citizens to submit a proposal to the European Commission. At least one million EU citizens have to sign the initiative. But the wording of the article is quite open to interpretation. In our ECI-update from 23 November 2009, we present a first analysis of the Green Paper of the EU-Commission. Moreover check out the ten basic elements for a fair implementation, which are produced by an international group of experts and activists based on the best practice with citizens’ initiative rights in Europe. More…

In order to prepare the legislation which will make the ECI operational, the European Commission has now published a Green Paper. This action coincides with the launching of a public consultation process, which aims at seeking views of all interested individual citizens and organizations on how to design the implementation laws for the European Citizens Initiative.
In the third issue of ECI-News, the ECI campaign coordinator Carsten Berg informs in detail about the points being debated and the expectations being raised towards the European Commission by civil society organisations. Have a look…

It is now more than four years ago that the Swiss student Anna Zuber had the idea to start the "Initiative for the European Citizens’ Initiative". More than a hundred NGOs joined the campaign, thousands of people signed. The European Parliament has voted on the European Citizens Initiative – in favour. In a newsletter (dated 3 September 2009), Carsten Berg, the coordinator of the campaign, informs about the current situation and the challenges ahead. Have a look…

The signatures are the result of a Europe-wide campaign, involving organisations and initiatives in various countries. Most of the signatures are coming from the Netherlands, Poland, France, Belgium and Bulgaria.
ECI-signatures were accepted with great interest and respect by the Vice-Presidents of the European Parliament Diana Wallis (Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe) Gerard Onesta (Group of European Greens / European Free Alliance) and the former Vice-President Sylvia-Yvonne Kaufmann (Confederal Group of the European Left / Nordic Green Left), who have taken the ECI-signatures on behalf of the President of the European Parliament, Mr. Pöttering (Group of the European People’s Party / European Democrats). More…

Michael Efler and Carsten Berg from Democracy International have been working in the European Convention for the European Citizens’ Initiative. Read the story how the European Citizens’ Initiative found its way into the draft version of the “European Constitution”.

Step one: paving the way

From March 2002 to November 2002 our work was concentrated on discussing our concrete proposals and on individual meetings with Convention members. At the end of March, IRI Europe founded a network of interested Convention members and NGOs. The report “Voices of Europe – the growing importance of Initiatives and Referendums in the European integration process” was sent to all Convention members, MEPs and national parliaments. A conference organized by IRI Europe in mid-September brought together almost 100 hundred participants from 20 countries and demonstrated the growing and broad interest in the issue. After much deliberation, we decided to push for two ideas: first (also the first priority), a referendum on the European constitution; and second, the introduction of far-reaching elements of direct democracy (a right of citizens’ initiative including citizens’ referendums and obligatory referendums for constitutional amendments). Our strategy was not to reduce our demands at the beginning. More…