MEPs voting in the European Parliament's constitutional affairs committee on Tuesday evening (29 November) unanimously adopted a report, drafted by French centre-right MEP Alain Lamassoure, calling for a lower threshold of participating countries, earlier admissibility checks and an easier petition signing process.
A million signatures…
The European Citizens' Initiative (ECI), as introduced by the Lisbon Treaty, allows citizens to request new EU legislation once a million signatures from "a significant number" of member states have been collected asking the European Commission to do so (see 'Background').
The EU institutions are currently engaged in negotiations designed to reach agreement on how the ECI will work in practice.
The most contentious issue is admissibility. Significant gaps have emerged between the positions of officials in all three EU institutions regarding the timing of checks on an ECI's admissibility, verifying the authenticity of signatures and the minimum number of member states from which the signatures must come.
The Commission wants to check the admissibility of an ECI only after 300,000 signatures have been collected, but MEPs this week decided that the check must be done at the beginning of the process when an initiative is first registered on the EU executive's website.
"Checking earlier would ensure that citizens do not end up signing initiatives that do not meet the admissibility criteria," the MEPs said in their report.
Instead, "a citizens' committee" of at least seven members from seven member states should be enough to register an initiative, they decided.
…from a fifth of EU member states
The committee also wants the minimum threshold of participating countries to be lowered to a fifth of EU member states, instead of the nine proposed by the Commission and backed by governments.
MEPs opted to delete a requirement for citizens to give their ID number when signing an ECI, insisting that a signatory's name, address, nationality, and date and place of birth would suffice.
As for their minimum age, signatories should "be of the age laid down in each member state, taking as reference the European Parliament elections," according to the report, which was drafted by Lamassoure together with the Parliament's other rapporteurs on the ECI, Hungarian MEP Zita Gurmai (Socialists & Democrats), UK MEP Diana Wallis (Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe) and German MEP Gerald Häfner (Greens/European Free Alliance).
Euroscepticism fears
Asked yesterday whether he feared that people would seize upon the ECI to push an anti-EU, racist or xenophobic agenda, Lamassoure said "the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but so is the road to paradise". "It's always the right time to introduce more democracy," he said.
"Political parties may use it as a tool. Lobbyists may harness it for their own interests. Eurosceptics and federalists may use it to push for referenda furthering their goals. Let them. It's high time to boost debate and democracy in Europe, and citizens will also have the chance to repeal decisions," he said.
In fact, Lamassoure is optimistic that the ECI will not be hijacked for sinister means. "Movements of rage often express themselves differently. They don't need petitions for that," he said.
MEPs also want the Commission to provide a user-friendly guide and a help desk to assist citizens with registering an ECI and called for a public hearing to be held with representatives of the Parliament and the EU executive to discuss any initiative that manages to collect a million signatures within the required 12 months.
The report will now form the basis of the European Parliament's position during trialogue negotiations with member states and the European Commission on getting the ECI up and running.
Lamassoure said the unanimous backing for his report had given the Parliament a strong mandate to take into the trialogue negotiations, which began yesterday evening.
Commission willing to compromise
Asked by EurActiv to respond to the MEPs' demands, Michael Mann, spokesman for European Commission Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič, who is representing the EU executive in the talks, said the Commission would negotiate "in the spirit of compromise".
Given that the trialogue negotiations are ongoing and the Parliament is yet to adopt a position in plenary, the Commission does not want to pin its colours to any particular mast at this stage, Mann explained.
If accepted by all three parties in the trialogue talks, the MEPs' changes are expected to be formally adopted at the EU assembly's plenary session on 16 December.
After that, the agreement must still be rubber-stamped by member states in the Council.
