We are at the end of the journey, but not at the end of the story.
The final event of the Conference on the Future of Europe took place on Europe day. Now, EU
institutions have to play their part, implementing citizens' recommendations in EU legislation.
For a year, citizens across the continent took part in EU policy making for the first
time in history, with a transnational deliberative democracy experiment.
If you didn't watch the previous videos about the Conference, I invite you to go check them to learn everything about
the process, recommendations, negative and positive aspects of such an experiment, you can find the links below.
This time we will have some fun! We went to Strasbourg
to bring you the spirit of citizen participation!
Here we are in the core of the European democracy, the European Parliament, where citizens and politicians discussed their recommendations
for several weekends between March and April
For politicians I mean MEPs, representatives of national parliaments,
but also members of the Council and the European Commission. Among citizens, there were not only
representatives of European panels, but also those who represented the national panels,
and people from civil society organisations.
On one hand we had ordinary citizens.
on the other hand we had politicians, experts of the art of politics. Interesting, right? Let’s see what citizens they felt about it.
I am thinking this Conference is a great opportunity to change
something, and I would like also to say that some recommendations will get
somewhere, while others will come later than the other ones.
Personally it was really emotional and it was really
exciting, and I felt at the beginning very ashamed and out of my place, my comfort zone let’s say,
but afterwards we started quickly to learn how politics work, and especially in
discussions and meetings, and we started to take care of our words and time of speech.
And our question is if all the things that they say
in the Conference is the truth, or it’s a lie, I hope it is the truth.
The most important field in proposals are privacy, to me, and
fake news issues, because I think they are urgently need of stronger regulations to protect
kids, minors, as far as privacy is concerned, and for fake news, citizens need
instruments to clarify their doubts and have trustful sources of information.
In the meantime, civil society organisations gathered in Strasbourg before the final ceremony,
to ask politicians to really hear voices of the citizens.
The celebration day has been exciting, for sure,
but let’s see now at what stage of the process we are.
The conference’s executive board has sent the final report to the three
presidents of the Parliament, Commission and the Council.
The report contains contributions from European citizens panels, which approved 178 proposals between
December and February, input from national panels and events, ideas from the European youth event,
and more than 16 thousand ideas gathered in the multilingual platform.
The report is available online for consultations
you can find the link below.
In the document there are many significant proposals that citizens have made to change
the EU. As said by the conference’s co-chair Guy Verhofstadt on Twitter at the end of April,
the “Conference on the Future of Europe approves radical overhaul of the EU: end of unanimity,
abolishment of veto’s, launch of Joint Armed Forces of the Union, transnational lists and
many other reforms” We will see what it is going to be of these proposals.
It has been a pleasure for me to report for all you on the Conference on the Future of Europe.
Now EU institutions have to play their crucial part in implementing citizens' recommendations.
In the meantime, we will keep you posted about further developments.
So, stay tuned with EURACTIV. As I said. The story is not over!