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Swiss cantonal level. Thus, the restriction of collection time should be about 18 months or two years
to give an initiative committee sufficient time to collect signatures representing a fair share of citizens
from different member countries. The EU constitution must also ensure that collection of signatures is
not locally concentrated in order to hinder an organised suppression of people willing to sign for an
initiative. Much of the German experience with direct democracy in the Weimar Republic teaches
that signature collection should not be concentrated in officially fixed administrative buildings. It ap-
pears to be much better to allow for a collection in public places in general as most U.S. states and
Switzerland have it.
The constitutional initiative is adopted if a majority of citizens and a qualified (two thirds) majority of
countries is reached. Unlike the mandatory referendum, the jurisdiction of the constitutional initiative
is not a priori restricted in the domain of basic human and civil rights. It should be possible to extend
to human rights. However, both the constitutional and statutory initiative are subject to judicial con-
trol ex ante. Constitutional amendments and laws resulting from the initiative can be abrogated when
they contradict basic human and civil rights. Like the mandatory constitutional referendum, the con-
stitutional initiative should be laid down in Art. x + 3 on the procedures for changes of the Constitu-
tion in the final section.
The provisions for the statutory initiative are the same as for the constitutional initiative as regards
who can propose an initiative and the signature requirement. However, the statutory initiative will be
accepted if only a majority of citizens adopts it. Again, the Parliament or the Council are allowed to
formulate a counterproposal to a statutory initiative ex ante. The European Court has again the obli-
gation to check the compatibility of the statutory initiative with constitutional provisions before the
ballot takes place. Moreover, it should also be possible to make a ‘general initiative’ where the ini-
tiative describes a specific political objective and it is the role of the (Council and/or the) Parliament
to formulate the corresponding law. The statutory as well as the general initiative should be included
under title VI of the Constitution on the democratic ‘life’ of the Union. A new article must be created
that includes the provisions for them. In addition, the principle of participatory democracy, as cur-
rently considered in the draft constitution of the Convention, should explicitly include elections, refer-
enda and initiatives as means for democratic participation.
Two detailed proposals for an EU initiative exist. Although constitutional and statutory initiatives are
not distinguished, but instead formulated for abstract general rules, Epiney (1997) proposes that 10
percent of the citizens in at least 5 states or the governments of 5 states can trigger an initiative that is
adopted by the double majority of voters and countries. Weiler (1997, 1999) proposes a statutory
initiative that is triggered by citizens in at least 5 member states (without specifying how many citi-
zens) and is adopted as well by the double majority. Compared to the proposed constitutional initia-
tive in this paper, both have relatively low signature and majority requirements. In our proposal, the
majority requirement for the statutory initiative is with a simple majority of citizens, relatively low.
4.2 A Fiscal Referendum at the EU Level
Given the mandatory constitutional referendum, the constitutional and the statutory initiative, the
question emerges whether the EU Constitution will then contain sufficient safeguards to bind EU