In Search of the Citizen - European Year of Citizens

It was, Commissioner Viviane Reding declared, "A fight against indifference". Speaking at the closing conference of the European Year of Citizens, she correctly noted that the EU is "more than a market", but the story of "freedom, prosperity and stability" no longer worked as a European narrative. Europe certainly doesn't feel so prosperous anymore. From citizen dialogues to reaching out to civil society, the EU is not just trying to reach out to be closer to citizens, but you get the sense that if they could just deliver what people wanted, hopefully a new narrative will spontaneously emerge. Reding didn't say what Europe's new story was - she had to leave quickly for another Citizens' Dialogue in Lithuania.

How to make Every Year a Year for Citizens was the conference's theme, with discussions running from civil society organisation's at EU level to freedom of movement to the upcoming European elections. Hosted by the Lithuanian Presidency in Vilnius with the help of the European Year of Citizens Alliance ("EYCA" - an alliance of national civil society organisations), the conference was very much about how civil society can influence and interact with the EU - and above all the Commission.

And they do have something to say. Organising against the discrimination of the vulnerable in society, speaking out and even intervening in court cases in defense of the marginalised who try to exercise their free movement rights, and advocating giving a voice to 3rd country nationals who come to the EU. Proper consultation! was the cry, not "Insultations"! "Insultation" - shorthand for consulting with civil society groups just to tick boxes without really listening to them - was definitely the word of the conference. EYCA took the opportunity to hand Reding their recommendations for making the EU more open and democratic for citizens.

Here is the public the Commission yearns for - it's active, wants to participate and it has learnt the jargon, from your Charter of Fundamental Rights to your institutional triangles (even if this still proves a barrier to civil society organisations when it comes to knowing who to talk to). They can be disappointed, pleased, listened to or ignored. Most importantly, they talk.

It's a public, but are we talking about European citizens here? At times it felt more like a year of civil society organisations rather than a year of citizens. It's understandable - who else to you invite to this kind of event if not them? Apart from the bloggers, pretty much everyone present represented a civil society organisation (which went some way to slowing down the Q&A sessions, with each audience member taking the chance to explain what their organisation does). But though civil society makes a valuable link between the EU and citizens, you will probably only get that sense of a European public if and when the European elections start to feel European.

One of the most surprising speakers was the new head of the European Movement, Diogo Pinto, who - surprisingly for the EM - said that while the European Parliament does have new powers, it's still rational for citizens not to vote at European elections, because it's hard to see what changes in terms of power. Hopefully having candidates for the Commission Presidency in the election will change this, but it would be a slow process. The political drama of parliaments and elections is where you'll find citizens and a sense of citizenship emerging rather than targets and outcomes.

In future - the theme of citizens will unofficially continue because they couldn't think of a theme for 2014 - it would be good to have a citizens' dialogue as part of the conference (I assume that they were held separately due to falling under different institutions - the Council and the Commission). Having the chance to watch ordinary citizens put their questions to the Commission would bring up interesting issues and would actually be citizens participating.

So was the conference and the Year of Citizens a success? It depends on who you wanted to engage, but there is a sense that a wider public rather than simply campaigning civil society organisations was desired. At the opening of the conference it was admitted that it was "a mistake" to involve PR companies so much because it led to more of a broadcasting campaign than more engagement. After the European election promotion campaign in 2009, I hope the Parliament was listening!

ACTA rejected in the European Parliament

A victory yesterday for the Parliament and the demonstrators across the continent who have been keeping up the pressure against the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement: the treaty was rejected by 478 votes to 39, with 165 abstentions. A conservative amendment to send the treaty back to committee and wait for the ECJ judgment on the treaty's compatibility with EU law was also rejected leading up to the vote, resulting in right-wing MEPs abstaining from the vote - supporting the treaty, but afraid to nail their colours to the mast in the face of public controversy. Though 22 Member States have ratified the treaty, the approval of the EP was needed before it would come into force anywhere in the EU.

The public controversy and campaign against the treaty is now the model for using the Parliament to make the EU more democratically accountable. It was not just an online campaign, but included demonstrations all over Europe, and political pressure building through the national parliaments. It helps that the issue was one of online politics, with a constituency that would probably find it the easiest to mobilise across borders. Will we see other such European civil society campaigns? Digital and civil rights related issues will probably remain the most natural campaign issues. When it comes to the digital marketplace and the internal market, as well as crime and child protection on the internet, the EU is a main actor given that these technological developments have appeared and grown as parts of the economy during the internal market's existence, and since purely national regulations don't make quite as much sense as an approach here.

Direct campaigns on this scale are quite difficult to create and sustain, and generally seem to be best directed towards the rejection of a draft law or treaty, and don't often happen in many states. So will this help stimulate the opening up of the European Parliament? So far many of the Parliament's stands have centred mainly on its place in the institutional triangle with the Commission and Council. While there was some institutional self-interest in this case (the EP wants to be more involved in treaty negotiations), the political groups took their positions to garner public support. It was perhaps also an ideological battle since the right in the Parliament was broadly in favour of ACTA or an ACTA-like agreement, while the liberal and left wing groups were more ready to oppose it. Environmental and economic issues are also important and high on the public's agenda, but it is harder to build a campaign for such complicated policy areas for a positive change rather than rejecting proposals. Hopefully the ACTA case will spur political and electoral innovation by the Europarties and parliamentary groups by demonstrating that there is a politically aware public to tap into.

ACTA itself may be dead, but governments are likely to continue to try to push further and further on enforcement mechanisms for copyright without a reappraisal of copyright in a digital world. It's a very important debate, and it would truly be impressive if the European Parliament tried to take a lead in the debate on how to adapt copyright so creativity in the economy and the arts is encouraged and promoted, yet prevent the misuse of copyright in the courts and in society in a way that actually dampens creativity and could in some cases endangers free speech if badly enforced. It's not enough to halt the mindless and crude enforcement of a flawed system; we need to be proactive in adapting.

If the European Parliament is smart, it can capitalise on this and serve as a platform for an important 21st Century debate. And if they don't, we should force them: we've proven we can have an impact on the European stage.

We, the Citizens, suggest...

Recently I had to write a short paper on the Citizens' Initiative (specifically, the admissibility procedures under the Commission's proposed regulation [PDF]). The EP is still considering the proposal, and a rapporteur's report is expected in November. Still, the main points that are emerging from the Parliament are: to set 16 as the minimum age for signing a CI; dropping the ID requirement for signatories; requiring that significant numbers of signatures come from 1/4 rather than 1/3 of Member States; and increasing the time-limit for collecting 1 million signatures by 6 months to 18 months.

A lot of these ideas seem to have already been suggested by the Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions, but the Couoncil has only sggested lowering the number of signatures that need to be collected before the Commission checks CIs for admissibility from 300,000 to 100,000. The European Parliament needs not just a consensus, but a coherent and well-argued consensus to be able to change the proposal for the better.

There are 2 big issues with the current proposal: one is simply the ease of use of the CI for citizens, and the second is the balance between the aims of ease of use and the encouragement of transnational debates.

Encouraging transnational debates is a challenge because the wider you want the debate to be, the harder it is for people to use the CI successfully. The proposal of 1/4 rather than 1/3 of Member States being the threshold number would make it easier for citizens to use the CI. But 7 rather than 9 Member States isn't a big step down. In my view, since the Commission isn't bound to act on CI proposals, it's important to make the CI as accessable as possible. In a EU of 27, 1/5 or 5 Member States is probably as low as you can go and still remain credibly within the meaning of a "significant number of Member States" (a requirement in article 11(4) TEU), but it would help promote a greater quantity of political interactions across borders, and this would give the CI greater social value. It could be argued that this would lessen the political power of the CI, but a good idea is a good idea - even if it's controversal, it is better that it is discussed transnationally and that it's brought to the attention of the institutions than not being expressed.

Ease of use is pretty straight forward. Under the current proposal, the Commission checks a proposed CI twice for admissibility - once at the point of registration (article 4), and then again with the explicit admissibility check after 300,000 signatures have been collected (article 8). Clearly people would be frustrated to reach 300,000 signatures in a transnational campaign only to find out that the Commission won't consider their proposal, but the checks under article 4 are very poorly framed, and seem to give the Commission an ill-defined discretion to reject some submissions at the start of the process because they are abusive or devoid of seriousness or manifestly against the principles of the EU. Finding out the limits by trial-and-error (or even court challenge) is not a mark of good legislation. (I also doubt the need for separate check on the principles and rights of the EU - since Treaty changes are excluded, and the institutions are bound to act in accordance with the Charter of Fundamental Rights, I would imagine contrary submissions to be excluded under the article 8 check anyway).*

The Parliament's working document (PDF) mentions a threshold of 5,000 signatures before doing an admissibility check - a massive difference to the Commission's and Council's proposals. Along with the end to the ID requirement, this would make launching a CI much more attractive to citizens. The EP needs to clearly articulate the cause of transnational debate, and amend the legislation to enable this through clear criteria and conditions, and easy and practical requirements.

Although, if we;re not happy with the end result, I suppose we could try and launch a Citizens' Initiative to change it...



*[As a thought on a possible legal impact of the CI and the admissibility criteria: could actions against admissibility decisions become a more direct way of citizens challenging the extent of the EU's competences than via direct effect before a national court? Or at least an invitation for the court to rule on pseudo-hypothetical cases, should complaints get that far? Although it couldn't result in the challenge of existing legislation, the number of people with potential for actions against negative admissibility decisions could lead to an increase in opinions and cases on EU competences. This just occured to me, however, so it's not a fully thought out idea.].

The Bloggingportal Initiative

Over at Bloggingportal.eu, there's an experiment to see how quickly something in the Citizen's Initiative format can be translated and what kind of problems this might throw up. The results will be part of a presentation on the Citizen's Initiative by some Bloggingportal editors at the re:publica 10 blogging convention in Berlin.

The text was only posted last night, but already there's been a great response, with translations into 22 languages! But more languages are needed (Czech, Slovak, Maltese etc. still haven't been done yet), and since the goal is to see how much time or organisation it would take to make a petition accessible linguistically, non-official languages are more than welcome too. Anyone know any Basque?

The deadline is early on Thursday morning, 15th April.

Also, Bloggingportal.eu is keen to find more editors who know their way around the Euroblogosphere, so if you want to help out, you can contact us here. Since we're always looking at how to make Bloggingportal more accessible and useful throughout Europe generally, it'd be great to get more help on the blogs in some of the less widely known languages (but that's not a requirement!).

Citizen's Initiative Proposal

The Commission has produced proposals on how the Citizen’s Initiative, the ability of EU citizens to petition the Commission to make legislative proposals in an area, will function. The legislation would have to be passed by the Council and Parliament before becoming law, but the main points of the proposal are:

- minimum age for signees is the same as that for European elections,
- the 1 million signatures must come from at least 9 of the member states,
- there will be a threshold for each member state that must be reached for it to count,
- after 300,000 signatures have been collected from 3 member states, the Commission can be asked to say whether or not it would be admissible should it reach 1 million signatures,
- not only can petitions be rejected on the grounds of being outside the Commission’s area of competence, but also if they are judged to be frivolous, abusive or against European values (which seem to be judged against the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the values set out in the TEU),
- online petitions must be in a format approved of by the member state(s) concerned,
- organisers will have to be able to prove that they are not lobbyists.

The proposals set a high bar for the Citizen’s Initiative, and the intentions behind this seem to be: (1) to cut off time wasting petitions quickly/limit the amount of petitions the Commission may have to review; (2) create as wide a member-state basis to the petitions as possible; (3) (possibly) give a boost to the role of the European parties, since a petition on such a scale would probably need a level of organisation that the Europarties would be better placed than most to provide.

Rose over at A Bit More Complicated has raised the issues of ID cards and the worries over ID theft for UK & Irish citizens, and the complexity and validity of the member state threshold.

I can understand the member state threshold to a degree – it would be strange if you could say you’d support in a member state just because 1 citizen from that state signed your petition. However, I think that the proposed rules are too strict in this area, and forms too much of a barrier for citizens who might want to use the C.I. While it should be the role of the Europarties and NGOs to organise petitions and deal with the bureaucracy, would it really happen that often? And want does that say about true citizen involvement if organisations need to fill the gap in most cases? The C.I. could be in danger of being used so infrequently that it won’t contribute to bringing citizens closer to the EU.

So what could be done instead? Citizens should be freer under the petition system from member state-based restrictions than in the EP and in the EU institutions generally, since it’s supposed to be a more direct form of interaction with the EU. A lower threshold of member states – or at least lower member state thresholds – would go towards fixing this, but I think that it shouldn’t matter if the petitioners are geographically concentrated. Perhaps if the relevant EP committee in the policy area could review a petition to say whether it would support legislation in this area or not would act to balance it out – after all, if there’s nowhere near a majority in Parliament for the possibility of a proposal, it won’t pass (some level of threshold of member states would remain logical, however).

Finally, it seems strange with all these hoops to jump through, that when a petition is accepted, and the Commission says that it will produce a proposal based on it, there’s no time limit for the Commission to do that:

“Once a citizens' initiative has been registered, the commission has to say whether or not it is going to propose legislation in the area within four months. But, critically, there is no time constraint on when the commission actually then produces a draft law.”

Hopefully this will be changed. Given that the Commission would have committed to producing a proposal, it should have to come up with one within a reasonable time, or have to give good reasons for delays.