Participation in Europe

One of the major policies, both of the European Union and of the Basque Government, is to drive transparency and citizen participation.

The European Union has implemented citizen participation initiatives in order to discover the points of view, opinions, suggestions and contributions of EU citizens.  These initiatives can be summarised in three points:

• Your Voice in Europe: participation is by means of public consultations and online questionnaires published by the European Commission. Each consultation or questionnaire is on a specific initiative and the person who wants to participate must answer the questions already generated on the topic.

• Petitions Portal: the European Parliament provides citizens the opportunity to communicate with the Parliament and express their right to petition. Anybody who wishes to participate must register and then submit their petition online to begin to make contributions.

• European Citizens' Initiative: thanks to this tool, the citizens can contact the European Commission to propose legislation in some of the areas of competence of the EU. Citizen initiatives require the support of, at least, one million people from seven of the 28 EU Member States, and a minimum number of signatories reached in each of them.