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Totally dominant lobbies in a downgraded Europe – (part 7)

Barroso administration: Golden medal in serving interests

A research by the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO)

Through the course of the crisis, attempts by corporations and corporate lobby groups to influence EU policies have probably been more successful than ever, in part due to a close relationship with the Commission.”

Corporate Europe Observatory has gathered a lot of evidence over time and covering many different areas that shows how the Commission is easily captured by corporate interests. This report is an attempt to produce a condensed version of how the Commission has come to act on behalf of corporations over the past five years, focusing on climate policies, agriculture and food, finance, economic, and fiscal policies.”

7 - The citizens initiative: Mock participatory democracy – an experiment dead in the water?

Key findings

The way the Commission answered the European Citizens Initiative (ECI) on the Right to Water is another example of obvious lack of will to consider alternative visions. The Commission pretended that it had answered positively to the signatories’ demands, but in reality it just ignored them, listing already planned activities and pretending that organising a public consultation which was due to happen anyway was a meaningful response.”

... there is not – in contrast to the US or elsewhere where citizens’ initiatives exist – the possibility of binding referenda or anything else that would justify the term participatory democracy. The Commission continues to have the absolute monopoly on making proposals for EU legislation.”

The Commission did commit to promote universal access to water and sanitation in its development policies, including the promotion of public-public partnerships, but without providing much detail. The communication failed to respond to the key demand for new legislation to exclude water and sanitation from 'internal market rules' and liberalisation. In spring 2013, a strong public backlash had forced the Commission to – grudgingly – exclude water and sanitation services from the concession directive. Water services are not excluded from trade negotiations (such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – TTIP) and the Commission failed to act on the ECI demand to end the liberalisation push once and for all.

The water ECI organisers, also because they were the first to pass the one million signatories hurdle, got significant media attention for their demands, but no real change in EU policy. This experience makes it questionable how motivated other citizens movements will be to embark on such tremendous signature-gathering efforts. The ECI in its current form has not brought about participatory democracy in any real sense, let alone increased democratic control over EU policy-making.”


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