First citizens’ initiative to fail in its aim

Demand for legislation turned down.

The European Commission will next week defy a demand from 1,659,543 citizens of the European Union who signed the first-ever European Citizens’ Initiative, and will decline to put forward legislation on water provision.

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The initiative, ‘Right2Water’, asks the Commission to propose legislation requiring member states to provide all citizens with sufficient clean drinking water and sanitation.

It also calls on the EU not to liberalise water services in the EU and to devote more development aid to provide access to clean water around the world.

The college of commissioners is scheduled to adopt its decision next Wednesday (19 March), just in time to meet the deadline of three months set under the rules for European Citizens’ Initiatives for the Commission to respond. The draft response is currently being discussed inside the Commission.

The organisers of ‘Right2Water’– co-ordinated by the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU) – are scheduled to receive a briefing from the Commission’s secretariat-general tomorrow (14 March). Nine Commission departments are involved in responding to the initiative, with the drafting being co-ordinated by the secretariat-general.

Pablo Sanchez, a campaign co-ordinator at EPSU who acts as a spokesman for the organisers of the initiative, said about the Commission: “If they pass the buck, they are going to have a real issue in the elections [to the European Parliament].”

Privatising water services was a live political issue in Spain, Greece and Ireland and also in Austria and Germany, he said. “This is about what citizenship means for the Commission.”

A senior official involved in drafting the Commission’s response said that it would be politically tricky for the Barroso administration to propose legislation that would then have to be negotiated by the next Commission, expected to take office on 1 November.

Sanchez rejected the notion that it might be too late in the legislative cycle for the Commission to put forward draft legislation. “These are excuses,” he said. “We started in this legislative term and we were the first to be recognised, we were the only ones to have met the criteria by the initial deadline.”

The Commission extended the deadline for collecting signatures in response to technical difficulties faced by some of the early initiatives, launched after implementing legislation took effect in 2011.

“There would have been time for law-making,” Sanchez said, “and there still is time for law-making.”

EPSU managed the initiative and also provided €140,000 in finance as well as the equivalent of 1.5 full-time staff, according to its own figures. A hearing on the initiative took place at the European Parliament last month, and the organisers explained their demands to the Commission services and to Maroš Šefcovic, the European commissioner for inter-institutional relations and administration, who is in charge of handling ECIs.

The Commission has until 28 May to respond to another highly controversial citizens’ initiative, ‘One of us’, which seeks to ban activities in research, development aid and public health that presuppose the destruction of human embryos.

Some of the organisers of the ‘Right2Water’ initiative, including Germany’s giant public-sector union, Verdi, are now pursuing a European citizens’ initiative to protect media pluralism. They are seeking the harmonisation of member states’ rules on media ownership, transparency, conflicts of interest and the independence of supervisory bodies, through changes to the EU’s audio-visual media services directive or a new directive.

The deadline for collection of signatures is 19 August. To be valid, a citizens’ initiative requires at least one million signatures from at least seven member states (with specific thresholds for each member state).