First of all what is this European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI)? It is a new tool to involve citizens in EU decision making. Basically you need 1 Mio signatures  of European citizens to call on the European Commission to draft a policy proposal. Read some background info here.

Let’s look in the treaty, Art 11 of the TEU:

Not less than one million citizens who are nationals of a significant number of Member States may take the initiative of inviting the European 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.

The procedures and conditions required for such a citizens’ initiative shall be determined in accordance with the first paragraph of Article 24 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

The problem is the last sentence. At the moment negotiations are under way about  how the specific details should look like. The European Commission published a  green paper and a public consultation just ended on 31.1.2010. Legal uncertainty is a problem if you start a campaign now, but there are even more  problems of the “Free Sunday” campaign:

(1) Legal uncertainty.  It is risky to start a campaign when the legal details are not yet clear. The amount of the signatures might be clear but what about electronic votes? What personal details need to be submitted? What is a “significant number” of Member States? Will there be a time limit between the first and the last signature?  Some of the things have been debated but as long as there is no certainty it seems like a waste of time to start collecting signatures or even to “build momentum”.

(2) Campaign backing: The idea comes from Martin Kastler a Bavarian MEP, not the most innovative start but fair enough. At the moment there are 5 civil society organisations supporting the campaign: 2 Christian groups that are closely linked to the German WWII expellees  (“Heimatvertriebenen”) , two national association of Catholics and a local (protestant) working group of the CDU. First of all, this is a relatively small amount of organisations. All of them Christian groups and all of them based in Germany. One the one hand it is not surprising that religious groups are among the supporters for such an idea, but is it enough to get support only from Germany when you want to organise a European campaign? The main Catholic and Protestant organisations in Germany are not even  included and you can’t tell me that religious groups in other countries are not well organised…  But to give the campaign more credibility it is certainly a  good idea to include other non-religious groups. Trade unions spring to mind, but also various NGOs and parties might support you. Interestingly, Kastner mentions that in his press release that he hopes to get the backing of other groups as well – but why start a campaign page already if you could get massive support with some more lobbying?

(3) Website and social media: So you have a campaign website. Very good. But is it clever to have it in 2 languages only (English and German)?  I know it is difficult to translate a page into many languages but if you had more supporters in other countries it might be easier. And I found a facebook fan page. Well done. But again: only in German and only 377 fans… Other social media gadgets are missing, no twitter, no blog, no discussion and most importantly no tools to spread the message: banners, maybe user submitted campaign material. A successful online campaing needs to be creative!

(4) Media campaign. There is none. A quick look into the German google news reveals clearly that there is no hype whatsoever. A couple of regional and Christian German newspapers copied the press release, that’s it.

(5)  Problem with the free-sunday.eu campaign is the lack of content. Keep the Sunday free of work – ok, but how exactly? There is no background info, no specific legislative proposals, no overview of the legal situation in different European countries, only one page with a couple of bullet points that outline some objectives. However, lacking a clear legislative proposal, the danger is that others label you as not being relevant, which might not only kill the campaign itself but also discourage others. First thing to remember is that there needs to be a specific issue in which the Commission can act in accordance with the Treaties! So is it an appropriate proposal for an ECI? Unfortunately we cannot evaluate this based on the campaign website!

In case the the campaign has the aim to get more support for the cause and start a proper ECI later – make it clear and ask for specific proposals for example as part of a “public citizen consultation”! After all you want to include citizens, right? Are you looking for actual signatures or just for supporters that are willing to contribute to the real campaign – again this is not clear and might not be beneficial for your campaign.

(6) The slogan. “Mom and dad belong to us on Sunday.” is inspired by a  German trade union slogan from 1956. Is that enough for 2010?

First impressions, unfortunately, count – especially for campaigns. The free-sunday.eu campaign is unprofessional and looks amateurish. Let’s hope the next campaign looks more promising (animal rights groups are usually very professional…)

Article would have not existed without Moray Gilland – Thanks a lot for the twitter discussion

Update: Another rather critical take on the issue by  Matthew Lowry’s Tamsanian Devil.

The German Marshall Fund  of the United States (GMF) also published a ‘Moldovan NGO statement’: A Sustainable Solution to Political Crisis in Moldova Due to security concerns, the organisations behind it are not named.

One of the worrying developments in Moldova seems to be the deteriorating situation for journalists. Reporters without Borders “is very disturbed that the Moldovan authorities have been arresting journalists and even using violence against them.”

According to Nicu Popescu, several cyber attacks were carried out against Moldovan news sites. He also reports about FT and BBC journalists that were not allowed to enter the country.

The goal of the NGOs study is two-fold: on the one hand, to look into how the MEPs contributed, through their activity, to stimulating participative democracy, and, on the other hand, to consolidate people’s trust in the European Parliament by empowering them to take an informed decision when voting for their MEPs in June 2009. The study is based on activity reports (voluntarily submitted to the NGO by a part of the MEPs), personal pages on the EP website, personal websites and/or blogs as well as the presence at plenary debates and at committee meetings. The main criteria used throughout the study were the way the MEPs relate to the citizens they represent, the transparency of their activity, as well as the relevance of their actions for the overall EP output.

The study is mainly made up by short profiles of each Romanian MEP, containing both quantitative data (presence at debates, number of reports and amendments drafted, number of interventions in plenary, etc), and qualitative information about their work (main topics addressed, social groups represented, other activities in which they were involved, etc). Moreover, the communication with the citizens was also analysed, focusing on accessibility (email address and other contact details), the quality of the information posted on the website, as well as the openness to discuss with the people though a blog.

Taking into account all these various aspects, the MEPs activity ìs assessed as either: ” weak”, “medium”, “good” or “very good”. Overall the picture does not look too bad, and the fact that the study sheds light on the specific areas each MEP focused on turns out to be very useful and reduces the risk of generalisation. Moreover, the study (which you can read here) is written in a very clear and reader-friendly manner and can be a very good information tool in the upcoming elections campaign.

And, what is more important, it sets a good example of what more NGOs (and not necessarily think tanks!) from other member states could do in a drive towards more transparency and increasing people’s interst and trust in the MEPs they are electing.

So where are similar reports from other countries that assess the performance of MEPs? What happened to the MEP tracking website? Votewatch.eu is still not launched… and the EP elections are coming closer. In an ideal world this kind of data would have been used by political parties in the nomination process…

So what can we make out of this? Of course this is an excellent idea how to involve a wide range of people and civil society organisations in a process like this. (I wonder if the EU could not introduce this model for the ‘usual’ consultation processes.) No doubt, relations between the EU and Africa need to be strengthened and a shared strategy seems to be a useful thing. But it is also true that the topic is far to broad, a shared vision of Europe and Africa is somewhat very ambitious. The organisers also present a timeline of consultations that will eventually allow people to discuss more detailed topics, so there is something to look forward to.

Nevertheless, this promise has been made:

The European and African experts will meet in an EU-Africa expert meeting on the 19-23 of February, where they will start to discuss the content of the joint strategy. Since we want to ensure an optimal linkage between the public debate and the official negotiation, we will submit the initial comments and ideas presented on the web site to the official negotiators at the end of next week. The same will be done for future official expert meetings (see calendar and timeline of the consultation for details): we will submit each time a short summary of your comments and contributions to the experts

It also remains to be seen how the comments will be used in the EU-AU negotiations and how short these ‘summaries’ will be in the end. I hope the process is that transparent that we eventually see also these summaries. But then again, the consultation does not seem to be very popular: 2060 visitors and only 35 comments during one week (which should not be too difficult to summarise …. unless some more comments are made in the next days and months!!).

The campaign “seeks to collect opinions and concern of the European citizens on a range of topics.” The first step was to translate this into all official EU languages.