EU initiative to allow the public to put forward petitions for new laws to be reviewed after campaign to oppose gay marriage received one million signatures

Jan 8, 2016 by Jill

By John Stevens, Mailonline:

A scheme allowing the public to put forward new EU laws is being reviewed after a campaign to define marriage as between a man and a woman.

The European Citizens’ Initiative was supposed to boost democracy by forcing the European Commission to examine proposals that were backed by more than a million signatures.

But Brussels officials have been accused of failing to recognise the whole point of the scheme after they complained the public were proposing the wrong sort of laws.

After Christian groups started gathering support for a proposal that gay marriage should not be recognised in European law, Eurocrats voiced concerns the petitions system could ‘generate euroscepticism’.

At a meeting in Brussels last month where EU commissioners were told that campaigners wanted to start the petition on the definition of marriage they ordered a review.

The minutes reveal: ‘During the ensuing discussion, the Members regretted that experience to date had shown that citizens’ initiatives did not always move European law or the European project forward, but tended instead to involve highly controversial and emotionally charged issues of greater interest to minorities than to the vast majority of EU citizens and, ultimately, generated Euroscepticism.

‘[They] called for a debate on how to rectify this situation and stressed that, in the current European context, the Commission should take account of the political consequences that this mechanism could have in the longer term.’

It was noted that the European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, ‘was in favour of discussing these matters at the Commission seminar to be held early in 2016’.

Under the European Citizens’ Initiative scheme, which was introduced in 2012, the European Commission has to looks at proposed changes to EU law if campaigners collect one million signatures from across at least seven member states.

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