Alberto CotticaIf you are a European Union citizen, there is a concrete way you can support a peaceful resolution in Iran and Gaza: you can demand the full suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement in view of Israel’s violations of human rights.
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This treaty is the legal cornerstone of cooperation between the two parties. Its suspension would be a big deal for Israel: the EU is by far its main trading partner, and its universities rely on the Horizon Europe programme for research funding.
Early this year, a group of people launched a European Citizen Initiative (ECI) to demand its suspension:
https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/2025/000005_en
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kaika1975It's good to know but they recolt a lot of personal data such at the specific addressee :(
@kaika1975 indeed. This is because this is an "official" signature, that you need to back with eID or ID to show that (a) you exist, (b) you are an EU citizen with the right to sign, and (c) you did not sign multiple times. Necessary evil I'm afraid.
Magnus Ahltorp@kaika1975 @alberto_cottica Yes, that’s a problem. They have to be able to identify that it is a citizen and that people only sign once. That unfortunately means that each country goes through the signatures from their country (after the proposal time is up) and can potentially repress people who have signed. Even if that would never happen, the fear is enough in itself.
@ahltorp just so. The good news is that those for us who are privileged enough to not worry about being repressed can pick up some slack for the others: the legal and political effect of an ECI is independent from the precise distribution of the signatures, as long as the minimum conditions are met.
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Politically, it is of course good if many, or most, countries have a large number of supporters. And that the absolute number is large: not just 1,000,001 (with the risk that some signature would be invalidated in the checking phase), I would push for 3 or 4 million in this case.
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@alberto_cottica @kaika1975 Exactly, it makes it very important for us to sign.
Boudhttps://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/how-it-works/faq_en
"The Commission sends the signatures collected using its online collection system to the Member States via its file exchange service."
As @alberto_cottica says, "those [of] us who are privileged enough to not worry about being repressed can pick up some slack for the others".
And bureaucratic errors could lead to some wrong deletions, although you should store your hash string ("Signature identifier") for checking later in the "confirmed" list.
Juho Mäntysalo@ahltorp @kaika1975 @alberto_cottica
An understandable fear. A few months ago a Finnish newspaper went through the signatories in a few state initiatives¹ that were fascist adjacent. Ban workers' unions, etc. A lot of famous names: CEOs and the like.
Soon after the far-right government of ours started discussing hiding the names from public.
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¹ Also official: 50k names and parliament has to discuss it. The names are collected either online or offline. They're public for historical reasons.