European Citizen Initiative

Corsendonk

Whats the lastest update on this? When I asked before in June you said it had been delayed.

TalkToEU: John

Hi Corsendonk.
Same answer stands as before really.
Not necessarily delayed. More so, it's still passing through the legislative process of the EU institutions which can take some time.

TalkToEU: John wrote: »

The regulation to enable the European Citizens Initiative (ECI) has not yet been 100% decided upon and has not been enacted. It is hoped that ECI will be fully in place by the beginning of 2011 with the first petitions being submitted shortly afterward.

The current status is that the European Commission has drafted a proposal on how to implement the ECI. This was after a public consultation.
Some finer details have yet to approved before the legislation is enacted and approval is granted by both the European Parliament and the Council.

You can read more on the status of the ECI and its implementation proposal here

The proposal on how to enact this is in the European Parliament for consideration at moment. The Parliament and the Council have to both agree and vote on the proposal from the European Commission before this can be put in place.

To update you. Some of the points being discussed by the European Parliament are related to: who and who isn't admissible to sign a petition, how to prove the identity of a signatory, how long should signatures be allowed to be collected for?

You can read more on how this the Parliament is discussing the issue here.

It's still hoped that this will be in place by early next year.
Despite the legislation not yet being in place, some good news is that Green Peace is already set to put it into practice with a petition relating to GM crop cultivation in the EU. Read more here.

BetterLisbon

TalkToEU: John wrote: »

Hi Corsendonk.
Same answer stands as before really.
Not necessarily delayed. More so, it's still passing through the legislative process of the EU institutions which can take some time.



The proposal on how to enact this is in the European Parliament for consideration at moment. The Parliament and the Council have to both agree and vote on the proposal from the European Commission before this can be put in place.

To update you. Some of the points being discussed by the European Parliament are related to: who and who isn't admissible to sign a petition, how to prove the identity of a signatory, how long should signatures be allowed to be collected for?

You can read more on how this the Parliament is discussing the issue here.

It's still hoped that this will be in place by early next year.
Despite the legislation not yet being in place, some good news is that Green Peace is already set to put it into practice with a petition relating to GM crop cultivation in the EU. Read more here.

John isnt the threshold of a million signatures simply impossible high. The manpower and funding required to knock on a few million doors is only going to be available to those who already are or have the ear of politicians. Thus people like myself who opposed Lisbon are vindicated in that the CI amounts to window dressing.

TalkToEU: John

BetterLisbon wrote: »

John isnt the threshold of a million signatures simply impossible high. The manpower and funding required to knock on a few million doors is only going to be available to those who already are or have the ear of politicians. Thus people like myself who opposed Lisbon are vindicated in that the CI amounts to window dressing.

Hi Better Lisbon, it would be 1,000,000 signatures collected across the entire EU.

To make the Citizens’ Initiative work fairly and reflect the views of all EU citizens the EU are still working out how to best make the Citizens’ Initiative work. Since the population of Ireland is only 4.4 million , it would be harder to rally together 1 million signatures for something we wanted compared to say Germany, who’d have it much easier gathering 1 million people from their huge population of 82 million.

With that in mind, and having held a massive public consultation, the Citizens’ Initiative is shaping up to look something like this. The one million signatures will have to come from at least 9 different EU countries (one third of member states) and each of those countries must provide a minimum number of signatures in order for them to be counted. This minimum number will be in proportion to population size. This is to make sure bigger or smaller member states don’t have an advantage or disadvantage when using the Citizens’ Initiative.

View

BetterLisbon wrote: »

John isnt the threshold of a million signatures simply impossible high. The manpower and funding required to knock on a few million doors is only going to be available to those who already are or have the ear of politicians. Thus people like myself who opposed Lisbon are vindicated in that the CI amounts to window dressing.

1 million out of 500 million? That 0.2% of the population.

That would be akin to requiring 8,000 people to sign a petition at domestic level in Ireland (although that option went with the Free State constitution apparently).

Corsendonk

BetterLisbon wrote: »

John isnt the threshold of a million signatures simply impossible high. The manpower and funding required to knock on a few million doors is only going to be available to those who already are or have the ear of politicians. Thus people like myself who opposed Lisbon are vindicated in that the CI amounts to window dressing.

Facebook? Internet? NGOs? Media? Its never been more easy to collect a million signatures from 9 EU countries. Sure if you can stop x-factor having a Xmas number one anything is possible

TalkToEU: John

The European Council and the European Parliament yesterday finally agreed on how to implement the European Citizens initiative. The initiative will now be open for application from early 2012 (later date requested from Council)

The main points are...

• at least one million citizens from at least one quarter of EU Member States
• the minimum number of signatures required from each state will be calculated by multiplying the number of Members of the European Parliament from that country by a factor of 750. In Ireland's case, that's 750 x 12 MEPs = 9000 signatures.
• The minimum age for signatories will be the age at which people are entitled to vote in the European Parliament elections. 18 in Ireland.
• Proposed initiatives must be registered on an online register made available by the Commission
• registration can be refused if the initiative is manifestly against the fundamental values of the EU or manifestly outside the framework of the Commission’s powers to propose the requested legal act
• The statements of support can be collected on paper or on-line.
• organisers will have one year to collect the necessary signatures after the Commission has confirmed the registration of the proposal
• Once signatures are collected and verified the Commission will have three months to examine the request made by the citizens.
• Opportunity to present their initiative at a public hearing organised at the European Parliament.
• Commission will then set out in a public document its conclusions on the initiative and the action, if any, it intends to take and will explain its reasoning..

You can read the full press release here.