Last June I appealed to the readers of this blog to sign the petition ONE OF US. I am very happy to announce that the initiative succeeded in surpassing the one million signature threshold needed to be recognised as a valid European Citizen’s Initiative (ECI). In fact the ONE OF US initiative succeeded in gathering over 1.8 million supporters.
It is also positive to note that the number of signatures from Malta exceeded the minimum required. The initiative needed 4,500 signatories from Malta but the number till today is over 25,000.
This initiative is appealing to the European Commission to greatly advance the protection of human life from conception in Europe – within the possibilities of the competency of the EU. Based on the definition of the human embryo as the beginning of the development of the human being, which was given in a recent ECJ judgment (Brüstle vs. Greenpeace), “One of Us” asks the EU to end the financing of activities which presuppose the destruction of human embryos, in particular in the areas of research, development aid and public health.
A statement by the European Commission said that the two other initiatives that succeeded in surpassing the threshold are Right2Water, who believe ‘water is a public good, not a commodity’, and Stop Vivisection, who want to see an end to live animal experimentation.
Grégor Puppinck, president of the committee of the European Citizen Initiative One of Us, in a comment to the Catholic news website Zenit said that this initiative will end the monopolistic presence at the European political level of the biotech industries and the Malthusian lobbies (such as IPPF). He added that “For the first time, those utilitarian forces are challenged by a profound humanistic counter-message. Faced with the commodification and annihilation of the human embryo, “One of Us” affirms the dignity and the humanity of human life, from its beginning.”
The natural question that follows is: what will happen next.
A statement by the European Commission said that national authorities now have three months to validate the signatures. It continued that once a successful ECI is validated, the Commission will then have three months to examine the initiative and decide how to act on it. It will meet the organisers so they can explain the issues raised in their initiative in more depth. The organisers will also have the opportunity to present their initiative at a public hearing organised at the European Parliament. The statement says that at the end of this process the Commission will adopt a Communication explaining its conclusions on the initiative, what action it intends to take, if any, and its reasoning.
The success of this initiative should encourage Christians, members of other religions to forge other initiatives even with persons of no religion to ascertain that the public sphere will no longer be dominated by the dictatorship of the relativistic and secularist positions.