Citizens’ Call for Transparent Trilogues: Let’s build a more Democratic EU!

On 12 January 2017, ECAS and VoteWatch Europe submitted the project idea “Citizens’ Call for Transparent Trilogues: Let’s build a more Democratic EU!” to Advocate Europe, an idea challenge that calls on civil society actors to propose unconventional and transnational project proposals aimed at strengthening democracy in EU and responding to present challenges emerging at EU level.

Our project aims to promote openness and transparency in the EU by making informal trilogue negotiations among the European institutions more accessible to citizens. In a recent study commissioned by the EESC, it was identified that 75% of EU legislation is decided behind closed doors according to procedures that are not envisaged in the Treaties and are not transparent.

Considering that European legislation determines up to 80% of the laws that affect citizens’ daily lives, our idea is to put the issue to EU citizens and solicit the “wisdom of the crowd” on how to open up the informal negotiations between the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the EU to public scrutiny.

We will:

• Use an online crowdsourcing platform to raise awareness on Trilogues among citizens and solicit citizens’ ideas for increasing transparency of decisions taken behind closed doors;
• Develop a list of proposals for opening up Trilogues and ask future Members of the European Parliament and the Council of the EU to commit to implement them;
• Widely publicise those commitments and monitor their implementation after the EP elections in 2019 by providing feedback.

If you want to comment, share, support or just know more about our proposal, please visit the Advocate Europe website at the following link.

We welcome any feedback on our idea and constructive suggestions for developing the idea further!