The European Commission is launching a wide public consultation to help to define the practical details of the Citizens' Initiative foreseen in the Lisbon Treaty. The Citizens' Initiative will enable one million citizens to request the Commission to bring forward a particular policy proposal.

Introduced by the Treaty of Lisbon, the Citizens' Initiative enables one million citizens who are nationals of a significant number of Member States to directly request that the Commission brings forward an initiative of interest to them in an area of EU competence.

EU citizens can already petition the parliament and vote in parliamentary elections. But there is as yet no formal procedure for direct participation in policymaking by the EU executive branch – the European commission.

Some aspects of the citizens’ initiative have yet to be mapped out, and the commission is launching a public consultation to get input from citizens before finalising the arrangements.

The treaty gives citizens the opportunity to ask the commission to bring forward proposals for action in areas where the EU has powers. It specifies that at least a million citizens from a “significant” number of countries must sign the petition. But it leaves open a number of practical questions.

The Green Paper identifies practical questions regarding how the Initiative can best work in practice. Questions such as the number of countries from which people must come, how to check that signatures are real, what form a petition should take, time limits etc.