Dear friends of the ECI,

We are now in the crucial final phase for developing a citizen-friendly
regulation to implement the European Citizen’s Initiative (ECI). The
European Parliament and the Council, working in co-decision, are currently examining the regulation.

There are several events planned over the coming months, in Brussels,
Austria and Germany, to discuss how exactly we can create a citizen-friendly ECI regulation. Please contact the organisers directly for more information: More…

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

The Young European Federalists (JEF-Europe) are mobilising all pro-democratic forces of their Europe-wide network to lobby the European Parliament and the Council in an effort to remove the unnecessary obstacles for launching a European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) contained in the draft ECI Regulation as proposed by the Commission on 31st March 2010. More…

Intrusive personal data requirements, narrow topics and unclear follow-up could render the ECI unusable

Supported by democracy advocates as an important new tool to bridge the large and growing gap between citizens and the EU, the European Citizens Initiative (ECI) is in danger of being rendered unusable by the excessively restrictive regulations proposed by the European Commission today. The European Parliament and Council will now negotiate the final regulations.

According to Carsten Berg, coordinator of the ECI Campaign “some positive elements have been added to the proposed regulation based on input from a public consultation and hearing. However, other excessively restrictive requirements risk killing the ECI before it is born. A few changes could ensure that it is usable.”

Read the complete press release. To get an overview on the Commission’s proposal  click on the flowchart:

Related Documents:

• Commission proposal
• Results of the public consultation
• Flowchart
• Questions & Answers
• Summary

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…

Carsten Berg, coordinator of the ECI-Campaign has made detailed proposals how the ECI should be designed, in order to be citizen-friendly and workable. You can find his proposal here.

This proposal was taken as the basic text for the European Parliament’s resolution from May 2009, see the link.

Mehr Demokratie was involved in the process which led to the inclusion of the
European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) in the Constitutional Treaty/Reform Treaty and
welcomes the Commission’s efforts towards making the Initiative available to
citizens as soon as possible by means of a Regulation.

Based on our extensive practical experience with direct democracy, the organisation offers this response as a contribution to the hoped-for user-friendliness of
the ECI.

Read them here…

Yesterday, there was quite an interesting hearing within the European Parliament. Slovakia’s commissioner-designate, Maros Sefcovic, who will be responsible for ECI, was scrutinized by MEPs. Sefcovic received lots of questions about the remoteness of the EU from citizens. Gerald Häfner’s question, many of you might remember him from ECI-Campaign, was one of the first one on ECI. More…