What are "Europetitions" ?

Any citizen of the European Union, or resident in a Member State, may, individually or in association with others, submit a petition to the European Parliament on a subject which comes within the European Union's fields of activity and which affects them directly. Any company, organisation or association with its headquarters in the European Union may also exercise this right of petition, which is guaranteed by the Treaty.  You can read more about this process on the European Parliament website at:  http://www.europarl.europa.eu/parliament/public/staticDisplay.do?id=49&language=en

The EuroPetition system enables Petitioners in different European territories to link up and share petitions.  The petitions are made available in local languages and the petitioner can use the site to help find people with similar interests in other countries to gain support for the petition.  The EuroPetition project is organised into clusters of Local Authorities in Spain, Sweden, Italy, United Kingdom and the Netherlands.

You can start a petition from your local EuroPetition website link on the home page.  The petition is then moderated by a member of the EuroPetition Team from your EuroPetition Cluster in order to ensure that it meets the guidelines of the petitioning system and to check that there are no similar petitions already in the system.  Once live it will then be shared with the other Clusters and we will put you in touch with people with similar interests.

Discussion will take place in the local languages and the Project Team will make summaries available for translation for the other territories to make it possible to track the discussion across different locations.  The project’s aim is to have at least one petition initiated for cross border deliberation from each of the partner territories.

Online collaboration sites have been successful in recent years, especially amongst the under 25s, and EuroPetition will include various tools to enable people with similar interests to form groups which traverse social, administrative and geographic barriers and help these groups to participate in decision-making on specific EU policies.

The EuroPetition project will make it easier for people to petition the European Parliament on pan-European issues such as climate change and the smoking ban.  It will make it easier for European citizens to collaborate on a single petition, subsequently raising the power of that petition.  While we cannot guarantee the outcome or response from the Parliament we can offer access to a wider group of citizens to connect to and support your petition.