2023-07-03 22:00:00
The summary
The organic law of January 15, 2021 relating to the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (CESE) established its role as organizer of citizen consultations in matters that fall within its competence. It thus has a wide range of tools for consultation and association of citizens: citizens’ conventions, online questionnaires and consultations supplemented by face-to-face mechanisms, groups of citizens drawn by lot, integrated into work training or well working in parallel, as well as petitions filed on its online platform.
While a budget envelope of 4.2 million euros entirely earmarked for citizen participation has been allocated to the EESC for 2023, which represents almost 10 percent of its budget, the finance committee entrusted Christian Bilhac, special rapporteur credits from the “Advice and control of the State” mission a budgetary control mission in order to draw up an initial assessment of the implementation of these participatory systems.
Its mission shows that the EESC has adapted its internal organization to citizen participation and is beginning to develop skills in leading these consultations.
However, in order to increase their procedural legitimacy and ensure compliance with the closed envelope voted by Parliament, the special rapporteur makes eight recommendations aimed at clarifying the rules applicable to citizens’ conventions in terms of independence, impartiality and contradictory, by instilling more pluralism in their governance, to revalorize the role of Parliament in the initiative to trigger these consultations – which must be centralized at the ESEC – and their follow-up, and finally, to control the costs of participatory mechanisms to better respect the sincerity of the initial budgeting.
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#Citizen #participation #Economic #Social #Environmental #Council #CESE #Senate
