In March 2024, the Citizens’ Committee behind the End the Cage Age initiative (EtCA) took the European Commission to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). This marks the first legal action of its kind in the history of the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI). The ECI is the EU's flagship tool for direct democracy: launched in 2012, it gives citizens the chance to propose new EU legislation, provided they collect one million signatures from at least seven member states within twelve months. Once these conditions are met, the Commission has to respond formally. On paper, this offers a genuine route for citizens to play a part in EU policymaking.
This is exactly what the End the Cage Age campaign set out to achieve. Since 2018, the organisers of the campaign built support for a ban on the use of cages in farming, and by 2020 they had collected over 1.4 million signatures within 18 member states. Additionally, the European Parliament backed the initiative with a clear vote of 558 to 37 in favour of a cage-free farming law. Shortly after, the Commission followed, committing to put forward legislation by the end of 2023. By any measure, this was a strong result, with Parliament and the Commission aligning behind the same commitment within days of each other.
But as 2023 drew to a close, no proposal had been published, and no route towards implementation had appeared either. The agreed deadline passed quietly, leaving the EtCA Committee helpless within the ECI framework with no way to challenge the Commission's inaction.
A case of full compliance, not failure
This is what makes the EtCA case especially interesting and worth examining. The campaign did not fail because of any fault of the organisers, nor because of a disagreement with the Commission's position. EtCA met every procedural requirement: the signature threshold, the Parliament hearing, the formal Commission commitment. And still, nothing changed on EU level. Such absence of legislative outcome cannot be explained by a weak campaign or insufficient public support.
This is what made me want to understand what had actually gone wrong, and it became the starting point for my bachelor's thesis, written in collaboration with Democracy International. Drawing on 25 documents and four expert interviews, I traced how the ECI's institutional design may have produced this outcome, and set out to establish whether EtCA was an isolated case or a foreseeable consequence of how the instrument is built.
Where the design falls short
Through my research, I looked at where this gap between promise and delivery actually opens up. The Commission's own Advocacy Handbook tells organisers the ECI will "trigger policy change." In the EtCA case, this framing was reinforced independently by both Parliament and the Commission within days of each other, meaning the expectation of legislative follow-up was not naive on the part of organisers, but institutionally authored.
The ECI's legal obligations, however, do not match that framing. Once an initiative succeeds, the Commission's only binding duty is to publish a statement setting out its intended action, "if any." There is no obligation to legislate, and no mechanism within the ECI that allows citizens to challenge Commission inaction. This gap, between what participation promises and what the instrument can enforce, is where the accountability issue starts. As one interviewee, who coordinates support for ECI organisers, told me: "you are making people feel as if they matter, as if their voices matter. But in the end, this is just performative."
Two findings beyond the existing literature
Through the interviews, two dynamics surfaced that existing research on the ECI has not yet captured.
First, awareness of the ECI's non-binding nature does not minimise legislative expectations. Experienced organisers are generally well aware that an initiative might never lead to legislation, yet, as one interviewee put it to me, each organiser tends to assume that non-delivery is "not going to [happen to] him or her." Therefore, better information about the ECI's advisory status is unlikely, on its own, to close the expectation gap.
Second, full procedural compliance seems to intensify disillusionment rather than soften it. Organisers who meet every prescribed step, just like the EtCA Committee did, have no reason for self-blame when the outcome fails to materialise. This leaves the institutional design of the ECI as the only available explanation for non-delivery. Such non-delivery, especially after full compliance, is experienced less as disappointment with the outcome and more as a breach of the participatory process itself.
No route left inside the instrument
The absence of any binding obligation to deliver inside the ECI did not just create a psychological problem; it also carried a practical one. When the Commission's deadline passed in 2023, the EtCA Committee had no way of challenging that inaction within the design of the ECI: no complaint procedure, no appeal, nothing designed for this situation. So the organisers had to build a response from outside the ECI entirely, one step at a time.
In November 2023, 57 animal protection organisations filed a joint complaint with the European Ombudsman, an EU body that investigates complaints about maladministration by EU institutions. It was the largest complaint of its kind that the office had ever received. When this also failed to produce a satisfactory response, the EtCA Citizens' Committee escalated further, and it led to them suing the European Commission at the CJEU in March of 2024.
Both steps were unprecedented. No ECI campaign had ever gone to the Ombudsman at this scale, and none had ever taken the Commission to court. This also means that every earlier case of a successful ECI being ignored had simply gone unchallenged. Probably not because organisers were satisfied with the silence, but because no established route existed to challenge the outcome.
Where reform is achievable
To prevent future campaigns from ending up in the same position, my research points to two changes. Both are achievable within the EU's current treaty framework, meaning they would not require renegotiating the treaties themselves.
The first concerns what happens after a campaign succeeds: currently, Parliament holds a hearing on the topic, but the outcome of that hearing carries no legal weight. Turning it into a binding vote instead would give successful initiatives real legislative traction that does not depend entirely on the Commission's discretion. This reform is identified in the literature (Longo, 2019), and one interviewee confirmed to me that it is procedurally feasible under the current treaties. It is worth noting that accessibility reforms alone will not fix the bigger issue of accountability: the 2019 revision of the ECI Regulation already made the ECI easier to use, and the Commission's 2023 review proposed five further improvements, yet neither introduced any binding obligation. Both institutions clearly recognise the problem of non-delivery, but so far they only keep addressing it by refining the process rather than by creating accountability for its outcomes.
The second change focuses on support for the campaign organiser after the signature threshold is met. Current support structures accompany campaigns up to the point where enough signatures are collected, but the EtCA case shows that the more difficult phase begins afterwards, when organisers are left to manage a Commission response, or the absence of one, all by themselves. Additional post-threshold support, providing escalation options outside the ECI framework, realistic expectation management while awaiting a Commission response, and monitoring of whether discussed timelines are kept, would turn what the campaigners of the EtCA had to improvise into something every future initiative could draw on.
A caveat on the scope of the findings
But of course, this research also has its limits. I traced the above mechanisms only among practitioners and institutional experts, not among the 1.4 million Europeans that signed EtCA. Therefore, my findings describe the experience of the ECI's most engaged participants. It remains unclear whether ordinary signatories, who invest less and also expect less, respond in the same way. Alongside this, the political context of 2023, including lobbying from agricultural associations and pressure surrounding the Green Deal, also shaped the timing of the Commission's reversal. That context, however, could only prove decisive because no binding obligation constrained how the Commission was allowed to respond to it.
The ECI was created to give citizens a genuine route into EU decision-making. The EtCA case shows that, under its current design, the ECI can produce the opposite effect for its most engaged users, deepening rather than narrowing the distance between citizens and EU institutions. This needs to be addressed by closing the gap between what is promised during a campaign and what can actually be delivered once a campaign succeeds.
