Abstract
From its official launch in 2012, the Minority Safepack initiative has always been a somewhat-troubled project. It was first refused registration by the European Commission in 2013, a decision that the authors successfully appealed, leading to an annulment of the Commission decision in February 2017. A successful signature collection process followed, and an expert group drafted legal proposals in order to put the Initiative’s contents into practice. However, despite a positive evaluation on behalf of the European Parliament and its Resolution, in January 2021, the Commission concluded that “no additional legal act is necessary” to implement the initiative. The Commission’s decision was regarded as a blow to both minority and diversity representation as well as to citizen’s participation and direct democracy. The present chapter evaluates the European citizens’ initiative as an instrument to ensure political participation, with special focus on the reform process that the tool itself has undergone over the past few years to make it more inclusive and more accessible, and provides an overview of the most recent developments regarding the Minority Safepack (from submission of signatures to the Commission onwards). The chapter discusses whether the Minority Safepack can be considered a success for a Europeanized civil society regardless of its final outcome, and analyzes through a comparative look to other successful European citizens’ initiatives and their outcomes whether a follow-up to the proposals laid out by Minority Safepack might still be possible, even after the Commission’s rejection of the initiative.