Citizens’ initiatives put Commission to the test
Three petitions have the support of at least one million EU citizens.
The European Commission will tomorrow (1 November) be set the task of responding to three petitions from European Union citizens that seek to end the funding of abortion, to prevent the privatisation of water services and to ban vivisection.
The petitions – which each bear at least one million signatures gathered from at least seven member states – are the first submitted as European Citizens’ Initiatives (ECIs) under the EU’s Lisbon treaty.
The organisers of the petitions, having met certain registration criteria, were given until 1 November to amass their signatures, which they say they have now done. Five other ECIs from this first batch appear to have failed to meet the deadline for mustering the required number of signatures.
The three leading petitions are: ‘One of us’, which aims to forbid EU funding of abortion-related activities in research and development aid; ‘Right2Water’, which wants legislation to block the privatisation of water supplies; and ‘Stop vivisection’, which seeks to ban scientific experiments on live animals.
The member states have three months to validate the signatures. (In the case of the ‘Right2Water’ initiative, verification started in mid-September, at the request of the organisers.)
Once verification is complete, the Commission has three months to come up with a response – its legal and political conclusions on each initiative, the actions it intends to take, if any, and its reasons for taking or not taking that action.
The Commission is obliged to hold joint hearings with the European Parliament on each initiative, which will give the organisers a platform for their message in the run-up to the European Parliament elections.
Angelika Niebler, a German MEP from Bavaria’s Christian Social Union, said that ECIs “generate a great deal of attention and are a marvellous opportunity to build political pressure”.
Niebler backs the goals of both the water initiative and the anti-abortion initiative and described herself as “a great friend of the ECIs”. “It’s a wonderful instrument for citizens to voice their views and to signal that their concerns are shared by many people across the Union,” she said.
Andrew Duff, a Liberal MEP from the UK, said he was supportive of ECIs, but felt the Commission’s interpretation of the rules for ECIs was too bureaucratic and its narrow interpretation of the Lisbon treaty gave an advantage to strong organisations that could easily mobilise their supporters. “It’s extremely simple for the Catholic church to meet [the requirements] because priests can simply instruct parishioners to sign,” he said about the anti-abortion initiative. “For green organisations it’s not difficult either, nor for the public-sector unions [behind the water initiative] who seem to think that privatisation is evil.”
Niebler said that the water initiative had had an effect in June, even before one million signatures had been collected, in convincing Michel Barnier, the European commissioner for the internal market and services, that he should remove water services from the scope of draft legislation that he had proposed two years ago on contracts awarded by public authorities to private companies.