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Open Letter: Accountable CoFoE Now!

Over 80 civil society organisations, including Culture Action Europe, submitted an open letter to Conference Chairs on 9 February, calling for more accountability at the Conference on the Future of Europe.

The letter calls on the Conference Chairs to define and articulate a working procedure for the Conference Plenary and its Working Groups that ensures that both the Joint Declaration and the Rules of Procedure can be respected, notably with regard to transparency.

The Plenary is the Conference body that deliberates on the basis of all the Conference inputs with the purpose of developing a single set of EU reform proposals that can count on broad political and public support. In order to ensure that the Conference Plenary can live up to its task, as set out in the Joint Declaration and the Rules of Procedure, it needs a clearly defined working procedure. During the last Conference Plenary session on 21-22 January, several Co-Chairs/Working Group Chairs suggested elements of the process that may lead to the ultimate agreement on Conference Plenary proposals. However, until now, there is no clarity on how the Working Groups and Conference Plenary will develop final proposals for the Conference, let alone any guarantee that this will be done in a transparent and accountable manner.

The letter states that his lack of clarity poses a great risk for the Conference. In the absence of a clearly defined, public process leading to Conference outcomes, the political divisions that explain why certain recommendations are integrated in the final set of Conference proposals, and others not, will remain opaque to the public. The letter also states that the best way to ensure transparency and accountability in Conference Plenary decision-making is by adopting the ‘European Parliament method’.The European Parliament is one of the most transparent and accountable parliaments in the world: not only are Committee and Plenary meetings webstreamed, also (pretty much) all political positions of the European Parliament are the result of a clearly structured public voting process, allowing the European electorate to monitor the actions of individual MEPs at every step of the decision-making process.

See the list of signatories and the full letter here.