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Your opinion required to make Citizen’s Initiative work (27th January, 2010)

January 27, 2010 at 1:27 pm Leave a comment

Public input is needed to inform a new scheme aimed at giving ordinary people a direct say in EU policy. The European Citizens’ Initiative will oblige the EU Commission to consider any petition for new legislation if it is signed by more than one million people living in a number of EU member states.
The scheme is provided for in the Lisbon Treaty, and the Commission hopes to have it up and running by the end of the year. But the regulation is still at an early stage, and a public consultation process is currently underway in a bid to clarify several potential sticking points before citizens can start exercising their new right.
For example, it’s unclear how many member states must be represented in a proposal, or how signatures will be validated. Irish MEPs have been helping the Oireachtas European Affairs Committee to publicise the initiative, and Labour MEP Proinsias de Rossa believes that each member state should be responsible for verifying its own signatories. ‘This could best be done in Ireland by using the electoral register,’ he said. He added that it is ‘crucial’ that there is full transparency on how campaigns are funded, to ensure the initiative is not hijacked by pan-EU, well-funded organisations.
Fine Gael MEP Gay Mitchell suggested that citizens and public representatives could come together to take an initiative on suicide. ‘We could agree through the EU institutions what member states might have the best prevention programmes in place, and how to share this knowledge while exploring why suicide is such a terrible phenomenon in Europe at this time,’ he said.
Northwest MEP Marian Harkin stressed the importance of explaining the limitations of the scheme. ‘It’s not simply a question of one million signatures on any issue – the matter must come within the competence of the EU,’ she said.
Ireland East MEP Nessa Childers pointed out that while this is a Citizens’ Initiative, ‘scarcely a citizen in Ireland’ is aware of the scheme. ‘It is ironic that such an innovative step has been the subject of so little public discourse,’ she said.
To have your say on the Green Paper for the European Citizens’ Initiative, log on to the following website:
http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/secretariat_general/citizens_initiative/index_en.htm

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