This blog already presented European Citizen Initiatives (ECI) one and a half years ago. After some troubles in the starting phase, the instrument is now fully working.
Currently running initiatives can be seen on this page, available in many languages. However, it is still a bit difficult to get from an initiative's description-page of to the initiative's support-page. For now, in many cases, you have to use the description-page (URL from the European Commission) to get to the initiatives' official homepage (URL from somewhere else in the web) to find the support-page where you can vote (again an URL from the European Commission). This is obviously a bit complicated, which may be why one of the first European Citizen Initiatives is about improving the online platform of the ECI.
Apart from that, many initiatives concern issues of social justice, education and mobility (ERASMUS being very popular, people want to extend the principle of ERASMUS to other fields, as already seen with the European Voluntary Service, for example).
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| Some initiatives feature interactive illustrations, such as these. |
Another important issue is energy. Some of the proposed ECI aim to ban waste incinerators or nuclear power (the latter being refused by the Commission: it hasn't got the right to suggest Europe a nuclear phase-out); others suggest taking a break from renewable energy and CO2 policies. Thus, the scope of proposed initiatives is very large!
Now, it is up to the people to decide whether they want to use the ECI-instrument - and if so, which topics to support. So far, most initiatives are still far from reaching the required number of supporters. The only initiative which already gained sufficient support is the ECI for "water as a human right and public good". This initiative reached the necessary mark of 1 million supporters (located in a sufficiently broad number of countries) some time ago; they now try to reach 2 million, in order to reinforce their message.
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