On 11 August 2011, the European Commission proposed to designate 2013 as the “European Year of Citizens” to mark the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the European Union Citizenship under the Maastricht Treaty in 1993.
The European Civic Forum, together with other European networks and civil society organizations, welcomes Commission’s proposal to put Union citizenship at the heart of the political agenda. For a long time, we have been advocating for citizenship to become a transversal dimension of European policies and a key priority in all areas of Union action.

This proposal is an important step forward in the building of a citizen-friendly European Union that would no longer be reduced to merely economic preoccupations. Nevertheless, we are deeply concerned that, in the framework of the European Year of Citizens 2013, the EU citizenship tends to be confined to an individual rights-based approach and does not tackle the Europeans’ sense of belonging to a common European Union.

For more than 30 years the associations with an important European and transnational dimension call for the creation of a European statute to give institutional recognition to the engagement and activism of millions of citizens who freely and voluntarily join together in associations across Europe.

The European Civic Forum was at the origin of a wide joint mobilization of associations gathered within a European Alliance for the Statute of the European Association (EASEA), to actively campaign, together with the European Foundation Centre and the International Mutuals Association, towards MEPs and bring the issue on the European political agenda.