Welcome to  the Campaign for a citizens-friendly European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI). The European Citizens’ Initiative  is one of the major innovations of the Treaty of Lisbon aiming to increase participatory democracy in the European Union (EU). The initiative enables one million EU citizens,  to call directly on the European Commission to bring forward an initiative of interest to them in an area of EU competence.

The subject of the citizens’ initiative must function within the boundaries of the existing European treaties and the powers of the European Commission.

The legal basis of the citizens’ initiative is set out in Article 11, Paragraph 4 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) and Article 24, paragraph 1 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). Both were last amended as the Treaty of Lisbon.

The practical arrangements, conditions and procedure of the citizens’ initiative will be determined in a new EU regulation. The European Commission adopted a draft regulation on the citizens’ initiative March 31^st 2010, which is now negotiated with Council and the European Parliament until the second half of 2010.

Citizens’ initiative rights to be workable need to be designed in a citizens-friendly and useable way. This is what this campaign is all about. Read more about the essential specifics and get engaged as well in this deceisive phase.

Citizens from civil society organisations like Democracy International and IRI Europe played an important role in the inclusion of the European Citizens’ Initiative in the Constitutional Treaty and then Lisbon Treaty. Carsten Berg, Coordinator of the ECI-campaign, was among the people who collected signatures for the ECI within the Convention on the Future of Europe. Thanks to the excellent cooperation with Convention members like Professor Jürgen Meyer, Sylvia-Yvonne Kaufmann, Alain Lamassoure and Guilano Amato ECI has found its place in the EU-Treaty.  Read the amazing story of how the ECI become a reality in a last minute move.

After the EU Constitutional Treaty was rejected by the French and Dutch citizens in 2005, Anna Zuber from the European Students’ Forum (AEGEE) had the idea to start the initiative for the European Citizens’ Initiative, by collecting signatures across Europe for the immediate introduction of the ECI with user-friendly implementation rules. More than 120 NGOs and foundations have contributed to this project so far.  For more background here.

In 2008 we  submitted several thousand signatures to the European Parliament, read here. As a concrete result the European Parliament issued  a resolution in May 2009, which was based on a proposal by the ECI-Campaign.

Since 2009, the ECI-Campaign has closely followed the development of the ECI implementing rules and is in regular contact with decision makers within the European Parliament, Council and European Commission. We organize events on the ECI, participate in hearings on the ECI and encourage every citizen to get involved in advocating for citizens-friendly implementing regulations for the ECI.

One of the members of the ECI -Campaign and  Democracy International is Gerald Häfner, who was elected in June 2009  to the European Parliament and is one of the four European Parliament rapporteurs for the ECI.  See one of his speeches on the ECI:

If you’d like to contribute to and get involved in the campaign for citizen-friendly regulations for the ECI, please contact: Carsten Berg and the ECI-facebook-site.

For an older ECI-video from 2006, see: