According to the Petitions Committee's annual report, EU citizens are increasingly turning to electronic petitioning, with 63% opting for an on line application rather than mailing a petition. With regard to the topics, the environment and fundamental rights continued to be of most concern to EU citizens petitioning the Parliament in 2010. Besides, EP received a total of 1655 citizens' petitions last year.

The Petitions Committee's annual report will be voted in Committee on 14 June and in European Parliament plenary on 4 July. The right of petition is together with the coming into force in 2012 of the citizens’ initiative, which will allow citizens to band together to demand changes to EU law, and the European Year of Citizenship in 2013, one of the cornerstones of European citizenship.

The first petition came in the first year of the Parliamentary Assembly in 1958 and was a Dutch request for compensation for damages caused by a scrap metal fraud. The assembly had to wait until 1964 for the second petition and until 1974 there were never more than 10 a year. Nowadays, citizens wishing to draw attention to failures in applying EU rules can turn to the Parliament, via a written request, or petition, calling for action.

Misleading company directory scams, breaches of EU environmental law, failure to recognise professional qualifications, demands for better food labelling, the waste crisis in Italy's Campania region and discrimination over Austrian ski pass prices for citizens from elsewhere in the EU are the most popular topics raised.

With the entering into force of the Lisbon Treaty, the European Parliament's power has grown, so has the number of petitions. There were 1,655 individual and collective petitions in 2010, 52% of which fell within the scope of EU competence. The EU often receives petitions concerning national issues over which it has no competence or that should more properly go to the European Court of Human Rights.

Regarding the Member States where the petitions come from, more than half the petitions concerned Spain, Germany or Italy. German and English were the most frequently used languages and most petitions were filed by Germans, Spaniards, Italians, Romanians and Poles. Estonians, Slovenes and Slovaks were the least active petitioners.