More than three million people across Europe have signed a petition calling on the European Commission to scrap planned free-trade agreements with the United States and Canada.
Campaign organizers argue that the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP, with the U.S.) and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA, with Canada) threaten democracy and favor big corporations over ordinary citizens.
“We started this to show what the scope of resistance is against TTIP and CETA, because about a year ago not so many people actually talked about it,” said Cornelia Reetz, of the Stop TTIP campaign.
The campaign, a collaboration of more than 300 NGOs from several EU member countries, submitted a European Citizens’ Initiative to the European Commission in 2014.
Such an initiative needs the support of at least one million EU citizens in a minimum of seven member countries. Once it has been verified, the Commission has three months to come up with a response — its legal and political conclusions, the actions it intends to take, if any, and its reasons for taking or not taking that action.
In September 2014, the Commission rejected Stop TTIP’s initiative, arguing that citizens can propose laws, but cannot stop laws being signed.
The Stop TTIP group launched legal action against the Commission and decided to carry on collecting signatures anyway.
By Tuesday, 3,118,566 people had signed its petition, spread across 24 EU member countries. In Germany alone, nearly one and a half million people have signed up.
Reetz thinks the scale of public opposition is having an effect.
“The European Commission now started to put red lines [in the negotiations] and that’s already an immediate effect of people opposing it. Because before that commissioners had free rein to negotiate,” she said, explaining that the previous college of commissioners — under José Manuel Barroso — was more opaque.
“The new Commission is at least attempting to release a few documents. Even though we’re saying it’s by far not enough — they are making an effort and I think this is also to answer to our protests,” Reetz said.
Daniel Rosario, a spokesperson for the Commission’s trade department, said that “lively public opinion” was “indispensable to any functioning democracy.”
“On this particular petition, the Commission welcomes that citizens engage themselves and make their voices heard,” he said.
Stop TTIP has organized a protest outside the European Commission headquarters on Wednesday.