“ONE OF US” Initiative: the EU’s political caste is not used to democracy

By J.C. von Krempach, J.D. | April 28, 2014

Two weeks after the organizers of the European Citizens’ Initiative ONE OF US presented their petition in a hearing at the European Parliament all the expectations are now directed at the European Commission. The EU’s executive body has until 28 May to issue a communication in which it will announce the steps it intends to take to follow up on the successful initiative.
The margin of appreciation for this decision is somewhat uncertain. The relevant legal provision is Article 10 of Regulation (EU) 211/2011 on the citizens’ initiative, which provides as follows:

Article 10
Procedure for the examination of a citizens’ initiative by the Commission

1. Where the Commission receives a citizens’ initiative in accordance with Article 9 it shall:
(a) publish the citizens’ initiative without delay in the register;
(b) receive the organisers at an appropriate level to allow them to explain in detail the matters raised by the citizens’ initiative;
(c) within three months, set out in a communication its legal and political conclusions on the citizens’ initiative, the action it intends to take, if any, and its reasons for taking or not taking that action.

On a superficial reading, this wording suggests that the Commission is completely free to decide whether or not it intends any action, and that the only obligation for it is to duly justify that decision.
Under a political perspective, however, any other decision than to formally launch a legislative procedure on the basis of the proposal that was submitted by the ONE OF US petition and endorsed by the validated signatures of more than 1.7 million citizens would be a disaster for the EU’s democratic credibility: who would bother to collect 1 million signatures for a citizen’s initiative if that initiative can be blocked by a simple decision of an unelected bureaucracy? The conclusion that one would have to be drawn is that the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), which was introduced by the Lisbon Treaty in order to even out the EU’s notorious “democracy deficit”, is in fact an empty shell: to get a legislative procedure going, it is necessary to pick up the phone and give a call to the right people in the right department of the EU bureaucracy – but not to collect signatures from the people out there…

In other words, a failure to provide for an appropriate follow-up for ONE OF US would not only jeopardize this particular petition, but the institution of the ECI as a whole. The idea of participatory democracy in the EU would be dead only two years after it was born.
Already the Commission’s reaction with regard to “Right2water“, the first ECI that successfully gathered more than 1 million signatures, has raised some criticism. However, the Commission did not do nothing: for example, it exempted drinking water from the scope of the new EU Directive on Concessions – a somewhat stupid and populist move, but apparently in keeping with the initiative’s programmatic outlook. The Commission’s failure to propose new legislation that would define access to drinking water as a human right is simply due to the fact that it has no competence to propose new human rights – and its true failure apparently was to not have explained this to the organizers at the time when the “Right2water” initiative was registered.

In the case of ONE OF US, however, the situation is very different. The initiative includes a full-fledged legislative proposal that was submitted to, and duly examined by, the Commission at the time when the initiative was registered – and there is not the slightest trace of any doubt that this proposal might fall outside the EU’s competences. The Commission therefore has no legal arguments that would allow it to say that it cannot launch a legislative procedure on the basis of that proposal; a failure to do so would simply mean that the Commission politically disagrees with the proposal and therefore decides to block it before it can be discussed by the European Parliament and the Council, the EU’s two legislative bodies. But that would turn the ECI into a patent absurdity – it would in fact mean that citizens should not launch any petitions for which they do not have the Commission’s political support. But that would then raise the question: what is the point of it all? If I have the Commission’s support for the legislation I want to propose, why would I bother to waste time and money with collecting signatures?

What is at stake here is thus not merely the fate of the ONE OF US initiative, but the deontology of citizens’ initiatives in general. A Commission decision to provide no follow-up for ONE OF US would be deontologically wrong.

However, bad habits can be very persistent. That is not only true with regard to the European Commission, but with many political players in Brussels who are currently trying their best to shoot down the successful ECI before it becomes the object of a proper legislative procedure. The brazen attempts of certain MEPs to turn the hearing on ONE OF US into an event in which representatives of the EU institutions would have been allotted two thirds of the speaking time in order to lecture the representatives of the citizens’ committee about their opinions on the subject matter of the petition are still in fresh memory. Even more absurdly, one MEP, Mr. Michael Cashman, even suggested that equal speaking time – and equal consideration – should have been given to representatives of the abortion and genetic-manipulation industry, just as if they, and not ONE OF US, had been endorsed by nearly 2 million citizens!

These absurdities have given but a foretaste of things to come. New attacks are being launched, in particular in the form of letters and public statements through which the abortion industry and its strategic allies seek to put pressure on the Commission to reject the ONE OF US petition. While the lobbies from which these interventions emanate pretend that these attacks are directed against ONE OF US alone, it is in fact democracy and transparency that they are attacking.
The arguments on which those attacks are based are as ridiculous as they are revelatory of the abortion lobby’s hypocrisy and double standards, as well as of a fundamental disdain for democratic procedures.

For example, one of the main arguments that the abortion lobby uses against the ONE OF US petition is the allegation that the petition was launched by “religious” or “ultra-conservative” groups, who are lavishly funded by “US based foundations”. This does not only not correspond to reality, but it betrays a problematic stance with regard to democracy, the implicit suggestion being that groups or persons not sharing the abortion lobby’s ideological orientations should be excluded from participating in the political process. But in the end such arguments fall back upon those who use them: no only can groups such as IPPF or the Center for Reproductive Rights themselves with good reasons be described as “extremist” – but in fact those groups do not have any memberships, do not have a valid claim to represent anyone, and have never collected two million citizens’ signatures for any of their positions, – but in fact they are themselves based in the US and completely dependent on the funds they receive from US-based foundations, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Packard Foundation, or George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. In other words, to those who know the abortion lobby is just once more exhibiting an amount of hypocrisy that makes Moliere(s Tartuffe look like a shining example of sincerity.

But even worse than the abortion lobby, of which nobody has ever expected that it knows the rules of fair play, is the way in which the government of one EU Member State has documented its utter disrespect, if not ignorance, of democratic rules.

This Member State is the United Kingdom. As the website EurActiv reports, the British government has issued a confidential briefing note to “EU lawmakers” in which it intimates that the ONE OF US petition should be rejected. It is not clear from the report to whom this note was addressed – but there is every reason to believe that the addressee is the European Commission and that the UK government is pressuring the Commission to abort the citizens’ initiative before it takes on the form of a formal legislative procedure. In other words, it appears as if the UK government wanted the Commission to abuse its executive powers.

It is of course no surprise that the UK should oppose ONE OF US. After all, Britain is the Member State that is likely to draw the greatest benefits from the current legal situation, given that it has the lowest ethical standards in the entire EU with regard to both abortion and stem-cell research. Britain is not only the country that recently made headlines with the creative use of aborted embryos (not only as a raw material for research, but even as … solid fuel to heat public buildings!), but it also is the only country in the world where the creation in vitro of man-animal-“chimaeras” (i.e. of “mixed” creatures with human and animal genes) is legal. This is precisely one of the examples of research projects that, being legal in only one of 28 Member States could nevertheless be funded under the rules of the EU’s framework research programme “Horizon 2020”. Don’t be mislead: if the Commission says that such research projects haven’t been funded under the EU framework in the past, this doesn’t mean that they couldn’t be funded in the future if the “ethical standards” remain the same as they are now.

In the EU, it pays off to be the country with the lowest ethical standards – and the UK is that country. Being blind for ethical implications makes a country attractive for investment – not only in the financial services sector (where the UK has for many yearst fiercely opposed all attempts to impose some minimum regulation that would have prevented the abuses that have led to the current financial crisis), but also in the area of bio-genetic research, where Britain is very eager to establish itself as a “world leader”. This is why the UK is opposing ONE OF US.

But the British government’s briefing note, besides confirming the country’s interest in keeping ethical standards as low as possible, also reveals a glaring lack of understanding for democratic principles. Rather than asking the Commission, which is a purely executive body, to misuse its power in order to block Europe’s biggest citizens’ initiative so far, the UK should wait for the initiative to be discussed (as a result of the Commission’s launching a legislative procedure on the basis of the ONE OF US petition) in Council: this, and this alone, would be the appropriate place for the British government to raise its voice and vote against the proposal. But apparently the UK, for fear of being outvoted, does not want the initiative to advance that far… in a certain sense, this case is quite illustrative for one of the main reasons why citizens are so sceptical about the EU.
Of course, this raises also some further questions. For example, it might be asked whether, if the Commission did – albeit unwillingly – launch a formal legislative procedure on the basis of the successful ONE OF US proposal as a response to the successful ECI, the question arises whether the Commission is itself best placed to promote that legislative proposal throughout the procedure in the Parliament and the Council. It is hardly likely that a legislative proposal can be successfully defended if those tasked to defend it are themselves not convinced. In actual fact therefore, the representatives of the successful citizen’s initiative should be given equal standing to that of the Commission, or even replace the Commission, for the purposes of the legislative procedure – otherwise the ECI is destined to remain an empty promise.

Arguably, one might even go further. If the EU is really willing to become more democratic, it should

• abolish the existing restrictions with regard to the possible content of an ECI, and thus allow citizens to make proposals that would involve modifications of the EU’s primary law (i.e., the Treaties, or the Fundamental Rights Charter), and

• modify the rules governing the ECI in the sense that a successful ECI must compulsorily be made the subject of a binding Europe-wide referendum.

In this way, it would for the first time become possible for EU citizens to have a real say on European affairs, i.e., to change EU law despite the obstruction of the EU bureaucracy. This is the procedure that makes Switzerland  the most successful democratic system in the world – both politically and democratically.

But for the EU, this would probably be asking too much. If the tug-o’-war around ONE OF US evidences one thing, it is that we are governed by a political caste that wants to be left alone by real citizens.

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