EUmans: Digital citizenship, legalisation of cannabis, the right to abortion and the right to die among the topics for a set of new initiatives

Virginia Fiume is the co-president of EUMANS, a pan-European citizens’ movement which strives to promote sustainability, democracy and fundamental rights through the instruments of participatory democracy.

Virginia Fiume: The European Citizens’ Initiative is our core methodological approach to addressing the institutions of the European Union. We have already taken part in two European citizens’ initiatives: one in 2019, which was focused on the protection of the rule of law, and the second one was “A price for carbon to fight climate change” or stopglobalwarming.eu.  We launched these European citizens’ initiatives to learn how the instrument works and also to advocate for goals related to sustainability.

Back in 2020, in collaboration with other European citizens’ initiative promoters, we launched the  EU Sign Day, a synergetic approach to help organisers help each other and increase the level of information among the citizens in the EU about the possibility of signing existing European citizen initiatives.

The European Citizens’ Initiative is a very powerful instrument in the sense that it gives citizens the opportunity to campaign transnationally across the European Union and to act as people of Europe and more than just citizens of their Member States. It also offers a possibility to try to directly impact the decision-making process in the European Union.

However, as with any other instrument, it is quite difficult to activate, especially for a small group of organisers and for ordinary citizens. If you don't belong to a large organization, it might be challenging. Also, it is an instrument that allows you to act only within the existing competencies of the European Union, so sometimes it is quite difficult to define a demand that fits within the framework of the European Treaties.

We used the Seek Advice function of the European Citizens’ Initiative Forum to look for feedback on the draft text of a European citizens’ initiative on the matter of cannabis legalisation and other human rights related matters. The service was very helpful, it provided us with the meaningful legal references to support our demands, and also with a lot of documentation about the current rules concerning those specific matters.

Watch the video with Virginia Fiume about the Seek Advice Service of the Forum

The ECI is an instrument that is unique in our transnational entity, and it is very interesting that the European Union allows citizens to impact at least in terms of agenda-setting the political process in the Union itself.

One important element of the European citizens’ initiative is the possibility to collect the signatures online and offline, that is different from other national-level instruments.

First of all, the fact that you can run a campaign digitally is an added value of the European Citizens’ Initiative. It is something that helps organisers, and it works quite well when you rely on multipliers or influencers. In our case, we focused our campaign on the role of local mayors and local administrators. For Stop Global Warming, we created a network of 100 European mayors that supported both the promotion of the instrument and the demand itself, which was for carbon pricing in the EU. That was quite significant because reaching the target of 1 million signatures is very difficult, but having heavyweight figures either from the civil society or from local politics or from the media is a way to reach out to more people. I think relying on someone who has a reach, who is either in politics or communications, is one of the key factors for the success of a European citizens’ initiative.

Read more about the Stop Global Warming initiative

Virginia Fiume: We have identified the next European elections 2024 as another key moment for European democracy and what we are trying to do, in collaboration with other partners such as European Alternatives and the coalition Citizens Take Over Europe is to try to synchronize multiple European citizens’ initiatives to follow up on the debate that will come out of the European elections, and also of the Conference on the Future of Europe.

We have identified three main areas of action: democracy, ecology and liberties as areas in which the Conference on the Future of Europe came up with interesting and important proposals, and we believe that accompanying these proposals through a set of European citizens’ initiatives, in particular, can be quite important.

The key topics might be at this stage a European citizens’ initiative on democracy in itself, for advancement in digital citizenship and the instruments of participatory democracy; the second area is the legalisation of cannabis and the third areas are abortion rights and the right to die, to push for the recognition of these self-determination rights as fundamental rights. In this framework, the European Citizens’ Initiative, as well as the promotion of European citizens’ assemblies or other forms of assemblies and instruments will be the way how we are going to connect groups of activists across the European Union ahead of the European elections.

The European Citizens’ Initiative unfortunately is still not as known as it should be. I think its most encouraging aspect is that it provides the opportunity to be actively involved in European democracy, so not to just wait for the next wave of elections, but to be an active citizen and use the right that we have as European citizens. The second reason why to use it is because it allows you to broaden the horizons of your activism.

If I want to see new things in the European Citizens’ Initiative, I would say there are three priorities:

• the first one is to increase the awareness of citizens of their right to sign. We ran a survey with YouGov two years ago that showed that only 2.4 percent of young citizens in four Member States knew that they could sign a European citizens’ initiative. We believe that this knowledge is essential, and so is the training of the media industry and journalists;
• the second interesting reform which is something we are going to commit for the next two years, is to push for a more systemic approach among the instruments of participatory democracy. The Conference on the Future of Europe had the citizens panels, which was quite over Innovative experiment for the Union. There were some limits, but it was a good stepping stone and we think that it will be interesting to associate successful European citizens’ initiatives with sortition-based citizens panels to guide this type of instruments on the basis of our trans-European mobilization and to further deepen the debate;
• the third aspect of is to help the organisers reach  local and national level authorities in the different Member States and make their activity on a European demand more impactful at the national and local level, which is a bit what EUMANS tries to do.

Related articles:

Assya Kavrakova from ECAS on the future of the European Citizens’ Initiative

Back to the Future: What the Conference on the Future of Europe should learn from the successes and failures of the European Citizens’ Initiative

Europe should be above all a union of citizens, not just of states and markets

Make it Known, Make it Fun, Show Them the Impact!