3 European tools for citizens’s participation

Citizen Participation

as in the Founding Documents of the European Union

Active participation of citizens in social and political life is one of the pillars on which the European Union is founded. It has included rights and instruments for the active exercise of such participation in its founding documents, such as the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and the Treaty on European Union. European Institutions created specific online tools to facilitate the implementation of such specific rights of citizens.

In particular, beside obvious reference to the exercise of voting rights at different geographical levels, several articles of the Charter explicitly refer to the protection of rights and freedoms related to the exercise of active participation in democratic life, and Article 44 introduced the possibility of petitioning the European Parliament on matters within its competence.

Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union Article 44 - Right to petition – “Any citizen of the Union and any natural or legal person residing or having its registered office in a Member State has the right to petition the European Parliament.”

Petitions allows the Parliament, through the Petitions Committee, to implement an ongoing reality on the way in which EU legislation is implemented and measure the extent to which the EU institutions are responding to citizens’ concerns. The objective of the Petitions Committee is to provide a response to all petitions and, when possible, to provide a non-judicial remedy to legitimate concerns on issues related to the EU fields of activity. Petitions can be presented in paper or can be activated directly on the European Parliament web portal. 2 www.europarl.europa.eu/petitions

Articles 10 and 11 of the Treaty, on the other hand, deal with the exercise of the right of participation and, in particular, article 11 introduced the ECIEuropean Citizens' Initiative, which allows European citizens (at least one million, residing in a "significant" number of Member States) to submit legislative proposals to the Commission on matters of major interest.

Treaty on European Union Article 11

“1. The institutions shall, by appropriate means, give citizens and representative associations the opportunity to make known and publicly exchange their views in all areas of Union action.

2. The institutions shall maintain an open, transparent and regular dialogue with representative associations and civil society.

3. The European Commission shall carry out broad consultations with parties concerned in order to ensure that the Union's actions are coherent and transparent.

4. 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.”

A group of at least 7 european citizens from 7 different countries is entitled to start the procedure to bring foreward an ECI and start the collection of signatures.

To facilitate the process, the European Commission itself set up an online portal that makes the signature collection more easy and reachable the goal. 3 https://europa.eu/citizens-initiative

The Conference on the Future of Europe: example of offline and online participation combination

The Conference on the Future of Europe, which started its activities in June 2021 and is expected to finish next spring, represents a rather rare case in the international institutional landscape of a combined online-offline citizen participation process for the elaboration of development strategies and the identification of political priorities.

As far as the content of this publication is concerned, it is important to highlight the role played by the online digital multilingual participation platform 4, through which tens of thousands of citizens were given the opportunity to make and comment on proposals, to participate in discussion forums and to produce summary documents that were submitted to the Conference Presidency itself.

This was possible thanks to the combined use of state-of-the-art technical tools and, it must be acknowledged, the foresight and open-mindedness of the organisers.

From a technical point of view, two elements were crucial to the success of the online platform: https://futureu.europa.eu

• the use of open and participatory software such as "Decidim", already used by several non-profit organisations and municipalities around the world to promote participatory democratic processes; www.decidim.org

• the use of artificial intelligence systems to automatically translate all proposals and comments into all EU languages. This has made it possible to break down language barriers between participants in the debate, making participation by all truly concrete and possible.

Decidim is a Free Open-Source participatory democracy platform for cities and organizations. But Decidim is more than a digital platform: it’s a common’s free and open project and infrastructure involving code, documentation, design, training courses, a legal framework, collaborative interfaces, user and facilitation communities, and a common vision.

Decidim is a platform for citizen participation made by the people and for people. Its source code is open and can be inspected, modified, and enhanced by anyone. The Decidim software is covered by the AGPL license. That means that you can use it, modify it and redistribute derived versions of it as long as you respect the AGPL license.