New initiative may empower citizens but has potential for strife

EUROPEAN DIARY:EU commissioners must take account of demand for new laws from more than one million citizens

WITHIN MONTHS, incoming European commissioners plan to give life to a clause in the Lisbon Treaty that obliges them to take account of a demand for a new law if urged to do so by more than a million citizens of the union. At issue now is how this potentially far-reaching system would operate in practice.

The idea is simple enough. The European citizens’ initiative, part of a reform package designed to boost the EU’s democratic credentials, would give the people served by the union the opportunity directly to influence policy. In theory at least, such an exercise in “participatory democracy” would give a stronger voice to European citizens. That is no bad thing.

Inevitably, however, the plan is not without potential for controversy. The recent ban on new minarets in Switzerland flowed from a public vote. On myriad topics – immigration law, for example – proposals to harness public opinion in favour of one measure or another could turn very nasty indeed.

That said, the EU citizens’ initiative is not quite a step from a springboard into thin air. Although there is no such scheme in Ireland, similar measures have existed for years without major upset in many EU member states.

Austria, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and the Netherlands all have national schemes.

While the development of an EU-wide initiative raises numerous practical questions, the basic objective at this point is to develop a credible and coherent system that can be a serious instrument for democratic expression.

The Lisbon Treaty, so densely detailed in many of its 272 pages, is largely silent on the nitty-gritty.

The treaty says “not less than one million citizens who are nationals of a significant number of member states may take the initiative of inviting the commission, within the framework of its powers, to submit any appropriate proposal on matters where citizens consider that a legal act of the union is required for the purpose of implementing the treaties”.

This leaves open several points, although the fact that the scheme will be confined to areas already within the commission’s purview is crucial. For example, the campaign to cancel public debt in the developing world might seem apt for a citizens’ initiative, but that is not in the commission’s gift.

In a paper* published last month, the EU executive underlined several knotty points that need to be cleared up before it can proceed with the scheme.

Still to be decided is the number of member states from which citizens must come to validate a proposal, with the commission suggesting a threshold of one-third of member states may strike the right balance.

A time limit remains to be defined, as does the minimum number of signatures per member state. One million signatures would constitute about 0.2 per cent of the 500 million people in the union’s population, so a threshold could be applied here.

However, it would be lower than in the Austrian and Spanish national schemes, where a 1.2 per cent threshold applies, or the Latvian scheme, where the bar is set at 10 per cent.

Then there is the unavoidable question of transparency and funding.

“In the interests of transparency and democratic accountability, the commission considers that the organisers of initiatives should be required to provide certain basic information, in particular in relation to the organisations that support an initiative and how the initiatives are or will be funded.”

This is fundamental, given the risk that a sensitive issue could be hijacked by a well-organised campaign group with a big bank account. It seems obvious that the source of any funds deployed in a campaign should be declared publicly.

The commission says the scheme may also include measures to avoid duplication by ensuring that a failed initiative could not be represented again before a certain time limit had elapsed.

It does not, however, allude to the possibility of rival campaigns emerging in support of countervailing proposals.

What would happen if 1.2 million people called for Turkey to be admitted to the union, and in response 1.3 million people called in effect for the country to be excluded through new rules on EU enlargement?

Ultimately it will be for the commission to decide whether to reject or take up a proposal. Any proposal it adopts would have to go through the union’s own legislative system, in which EU member states themselves and MEPs have a big say.

The scheme, which the commission hopes to introduce by December, presents a forum for ordinary people to urge political leaders to take a particular legal path. It is a given, of course, that public opinion is fickle. We saw that up close in the case of the Lisbon Treaty itself.

* The commission’s paper on the initiative is at this website: http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/ secretariat_general/citizens_initiative/index_en.htm