Word: million
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...Last week, the commission published rules for the citizens' initiatives, saying that the 1 million names would have to come from at least nine of the E.U.'s 27 member states. There are no restrictions, however, on how people can collect signatures, be it in the street or on social-networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. Once the signatures are in, the commission has four months to either accept the initiative by drafting a proposed law to go before the E.U. Parliament, or reject it. Petitions can be killed off if the commission finds them outside its remit...
...Meant to bring everyday Europeans closer to the E.U. institutions that govern them in distant Brussels, the direct democracy experiment allows citizens to sling their concerns onto the E.U. agenda. The principle is simple: if campaigners muster 1 million signatures for a proposal, they can ask the European Commission, the E.U.'s executive branch, to write new legislation. "This is all about taking the E.U. outside of the Brussels beltway and giving it full democratic expression," said Maros Sefcovic, the E.U. commissioner in charge of putting the proposal into place. "The E.U. often stands accused of complexity and detachment from...
...plan does not go as far as other direct democracy systems in Switzerland or California, where citizens can pass regulations via ballot initiatives or referenda. But in some ways, it will likely be easier for E.U. residents to propose new laws. One million signatures sounds daunting, but that's just 0.2% of the E.U.'s total population. By contrast, Swiss initiatives require signatures from about 2% of the population to trigger a national vote. And in an age when musicians from Coldplay to Lily Allen have millions of followers on Twitter and Facebook, collecting 1 million names could...
...European Citizens' Initiative, an organization advocating more direct democracy in the E.U., warned that the "intrusive personal data requirements, narrow topics and unclear follow-up could render it unusable." And Janis Emmanouilidis, an analyst at the European Policy Center, a Brussels-based think tank, believes it could backfire. "One million people is a low threshold and it risks falling prey to a 'tyranny of minorities' backed by resourceful and well-organized interest groups," he says. (Read: "Is the European Union Exporting Torture Devices...
...That may sound cynical and dismissive. But if a passionate European or two manages to collect 1 million signatures, they could prove him wrong...