Debate Europe Call for proposal

Debate Europe Call for proposal

The European Commission selected the "European Citizens' Consultations" project which was presented by the King Baudouin Foundation, in a consortium with the European Movement International, the European Policy Centre, the European Citizen Action Service, the European Journalism Centre, the Centre d'Information pour l'Europe and one national partner per member State.

A European website gives access to the network of the 27 national websites where on-line debates will be taking place. The target is to involve 50 000 active online participants on the websites. Web-users will be able to register requests to take part in the national consultations together with 1350 randomly selected citizens from all EU Member States. 150 web-users will be randomly selected to take part in the national events, making it a total of 1 500 participants meeting face-to-face in the national consultations. Those who have access to Internet will be able to debate among themselves via an internal forum throughout the project. The face-to-face national consultations will take place during the month of March 2009. They will be interlinked by video conference and the results of the national consultation in one country will be presented in all the others. The closing event of the national consultations will be a European Consultation to be held on 10-11 May 2009. There, 10% of the citizens who took part in the national consultations will endorse 15 key recommendations.

In a second phase, after the June 2009 European elections, a small number of selected citizens will join a panel of policy-makers at a policy dialogue event about the policy-implications of the results of the project. Five trans-national debates will also be organised in Bratislava, Berlin, Florence, Stockholm and Dublin to disseminate the project results and further promote dialogue between stakeholders and ordinary citizens with newly elected MEPs. 150 participants from the EU Member States concerned will be invited to take part in each of these five debates.