The European Citizens' Initiative: Council amendments - updated

Some days ago, I've already reported that the Council has come to a general agreement regarding the regulation of the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI).

Now I took a look back into the agenda of the Council meeting of 14 June and then into the Council document register and found the actual document (Update: 2nd revised version of 22 June) with the concrete changes that the Council proposed regarding the Commission draft.

Very interesting is, for example, the proposed new introductory clause 11a:

The Commission is encouraged to promote the development of an open source software which will provide the technical and security features necessary for complying with the provisions of this regulation as regards the online collect systems.

What is also significant is the list of possible identification documents/numbers that are listed for each member state from page 24, which, if I recall correctly, was not in the initial draft.

I'd recommend going through the whole document to follow all proposed changes; I suppose that this is particularly interesting for the Members of the European Parliament involved in the drafting process (saw for example that ALDE organises a seminar on the ECI implementation tomorrow).

The European Citizens' Initiative: Council agreement on draft regulation

As informed in a press release (via @lacomeuropeenne), the Council agreed on its version of the European Citizens' Initiative regulation today.

The main points mentioned in the press release are:

1. The Council wants signatures from at least 1/3 of the member states.
2. ECI organisers need to send in information about funding and support.
3. The Commission checks admissibility after 100,000 signatures

Except for the latter point, this seems to be following the Commission proposal; what is not mentioned are the Council's ideas for the online collection system that was still controversial in April.

The European Citizens' Initiative: Critical remarks in Committee of the Regions report - updated

According to a press release, the Committee of the Regions (CoR) - a consultative institution of the EU - has issued a critical opinion regarding the Commission's plans for the European Citizens' Initiative.

In the press release it is said that the CoR finds the present proposal too complicated and demands a reduction of the minimum number of countries from 1/3 to 1/4.

It is a pity that the press release doesn't link the actual report - a clear communications failure - and it was also impossible to find it via the document register of the CoR.

It is a pity because if the 1/4 rule was all the CoR was able to come up, this would have been a clear waste of time. But without the original document it is not possible to see what the Committee rapporteur Sonia Masini has produced.

So we might have to wait until 12 July when she presents her opinion to the European Parliament Committee on Constitutional Affairs (APCO)...

Update: Thanks to @Dana_Council from the Council press service, I have found the draft opinion and the amendments tabled.

Will take a more in-depth look later on.

ECI: State of discussions in the Council

The debates around the regulation of the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) continue in the EU Council.

Following the identification of key issues (my report), discussions in the Council show that member states seem to be split over most of these key issues.

In a Council document published yesterday, one can see that EU member states have diverging opinions on the admissibility check, regarding the personal data needed with the signature to an ECI and to the online collection system.

The main debate seems to be over the question of personal data and online collection of signatures.

Some member states apparently complained that for administrative reasons they won't be able to quickly check whether online collection systems from ECI organisers fulfil the required specification. Because of these questions, the Council has decided to organise an expert meeting that will try to resolve these differences.

One thing that seems to be consensus among the member states is that they don't want to give delegated power to the Commission in specifying the details of the citizens initiative as formulated in the Annexes 2-8 of the draft regulation, which means that any future revision of the technical details of the ECI except for the number of signatures needed per country would need to go through the decision-making process of the Council and the Parliament.

Seeing the differences between the member states I have doubts that there will be a regulation until the end of the autumn, in particular since after the Council has a first position there will have to be an agreement between the Parliament and the Council.

ECI, transaction tax & the details of EU policy-making

The German and Austrian Social Democrats have decided today that they want to initiate a European Citizens' Initative (ECI) on the introduction of a financial transaction tax.

The way their press release is formulated makes it sound like they are calling for a referendum (cf. last sentence that reads: '... for that 500 million Europeans can decide over the taxation of financial market speculation'), not mentioning that all they can do with an ECI is make the Commission consider the issue.

They should also mention the timeframe of an ECI and that once they had a successful ECI, the proposal needed to be taken up by the Commission (where there is no social-democratic majority) and it had to be passed (probably according to Art. 113 TFEU) by the Council with unanimity. The European Parliament would only be consulted (if the decision was taken under Art. 113 TFEU).

And only the EU experts - those who know that the ECI regulation is not yet in place and that you cannot even start an ECI right now - will notice that the last paragraph of the press release is actually just a demand that the ECI regulation will be put in place until autumn, so that the Social Democrats can begin their ECI. For the rest of the readers this sounds like the Social Democrats demand an EU transaction tax until autumn.

And if they knew the present state of the ECI discussions, they would also know that 500 million Europeans (as formulated in the last sentence) will not decide about an ECI because the participation age for the ECI is proposed to be the election age of EU citizens which will exclude some 100 million Europeans from this agenda setting instrument. But they anyway only need 1 million signatures.

It is thus nice that the German and Austrian Social Democrats want to make use of the new democratic element given to EU citizens, but the way they treat this issue is far from realistic and thus merely a PR instrument - but the press will surely buy it.

PS.: German social democratic MEP Matthias Groote is aware of that and thus focuses on his demands regarding the implementation of the ECI which seems much more reasonable at this point.

Geomapping test for European Citizens' Initiative visualisation

I was playing around a little with Google Map Visualisation for Blogger, just trying to figure out easy ways to visualise the collection process of signatures for the European Citizens' Initiative.





For this example I just uploaded a simple Excel spreadsheet and used it for both maps - but it is just testing and could be used for many other things, too.

The European Citizens' Initiative: Key issues in the Council

According to a freshly published Council document, the Spanish Presidency and the member states have identified four key issues that they need to deal with regarding the Commission proposal for the European Citizens' Initiative.

The four issues are:

• the registration of the proposed initiative with the Commission and the admissibility criteria;


• the minimum number of signatories per Member State;


• the procedures and conditions for the collection of statements of support; and


• the online collection system.

Under non of these four key issues mentioned in the four-page document the Council is actually looking at how to make cititzens' initiatives easier, except the fact that some unmentioned member states would like the Commission to check admissibility right at the start so that campaign organisers would not need to collect 300,000 useless signatures.

As for now, the Council plans to come to an agreement for "a general approach" until the end of June.

The Council thus seems more or less supportive of the Commission proposal, which I think is quite citizen unfriendly as of yet.

The European Citizens' Initiative and our re:publica 10 workshop

The European Commission has brutally failed, judging from some blank faces in our workshop on the European Citizens' Initiative at the re:publica 10 this morning.

Those European citizens present at the session - approximately 50 to 60 people - were to a large extend not aware of the current proposal of the European Commission for an initiative that is meant to be for European citizens. It needed four eurobloggers - eurosocialiste, Martin, Jon and me - to present the issue and to create stunned faces over the stupidness of the proposed rules (see Mathew's summary of euroblog reactions so far).

The lack of knowledge of the proposal shows that, until today, Commissioner Šefčovič has been unable to communicate the Commission proposal to a wider European public, and he probably knows why:

Because he has put forward a text that wants to restrict European citizens from running bottom-up campaigns; he put forward a proposal that doesn't trust citizens and that surrenders to technology-averse populist fears of "bad things that could come out of Twitter" (that is what the Commissioner said in the press conference where he presented the issue).

Bye the way, Mr Šefčovič: In one of those "stupid" "silly" Twitter/Facebook things you are afraid of we managed the collective translation of an ECI-length text in 33 languages within one week, including all EU languages and some minority languages such as Sorbian or Cornish.

So during the re:publica 10 workshop, we eurobloggers on the panel were very sure that the ECI as proposed by the Commission so far is undoable for ordinary citizens, it is way too restrictive and it doesn't take into account the great possibilities that modern communication offers. It is a European Initiative for Large Organisations, those who already have access to the EU institutions thanks to their money and the human resources.

It puts undue burdens on citizen organisers of an ECI, e.g. by demanding to register their online collection system in each of the EU member states, a bureaucratic procedure that will very likely lead to different results in every second member states, even after the Commission has proposed harmonised rules. Not to speak about the need to register ID card numbers when signing the petition. It also does not allow the collection of signatures from French EU citizens in the streets of Berlin or from Portuguese citizens on the beach of Varna (Bulgaria).

It is meant to be impossible, and it is so on purpose - you can see that because the Commission just plans to employ two stuff members for all ECIs that might come up.

And no one in the audience disagreed with our rather critical assessment of the ECI proposal; those talking were pretty sure that you couldn't run an ECI without the support of strong transnational organisations.

Several didn't even see a point in doing an ECI as it is presented right now, and we encouraged them to heavily lobby the European Parliament and the governments in the EU Council to get a final proposal that is not afraid of citizens but takes them seriously.

Dear MEPs, dear governments: Show that you have more respect for us citizens and more understanding for the usefulness of modern technology for democratic processes than the EU Commission, in particular Commissioner Šefčovič who showed his disrespect during his presentation three weeks ago!

Intermezzo

Begin intermezzo

Okay, I promised not to blog here for 2-3 weeks and so take this as a little intermezzo - but this successful experiment we have started at Bloggingportal.eu (where I am a co-editor) is just too nice not to be mentioned here.

End intermezzo