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.

EUNET, 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.

EUNET had joined an alliance of civil society organisations to explicitly broaden the scope of the EY2013 to all aspects of citizenship and raise its budget. A first meeting of the alliance will take place on January 27th 2012.

Read the open letter to the MEPs