The seriously secularised Netherlands has
surprised everyone by gathering as many as 20 thousand signatures in
favour of the legal protection of human life from conception espoused by
the European Citizens’ initiative “One of Us”. It is thus got past the first hurdle on the way to the initiative being considered as an EU legislation proposal.
So far, the “One of Us” petition has gathered more than half a million signatures with the help of the Italian Episcopal Conference.
The petition is asking the European Parliament to recognise the dignity and rights of the embryo. The President of the Pro Life Movement, Mr. Carlo Casini broke the news.
“This was the first in a series of goals - said the former judge of the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation and current member of the European Parliament – but it is not enough:this needs to be a springboard for further advancement over the coming months.”
Casini added that Spain has also exceeded the minimum number of signatures legally required for the initiative to be taken into consideration. It joins Austria, Hungary, Italy, Poland and Slovakia.
The law says the petition needs at least a million signatures and each of at least seven country also need to gather a minimum number of signatures. One encouraging fact is that “mobilization has started in all of the Union’s twenty seven countries. Even France, which has been busy protesting against same-sex marriage has now picked up the pace with its online signature gathering,” Mr. Casini said.
Casini also pointed to another very positive fact: there seems to be a growing “ecumenism for life”, which is proven by the fact that “the Protestant Netherlands are the seventh nation to reach the minimum number of signatures required by European law” for the initiative to be considered. Scientific research, health related international association projects and NGOs and EU-led public health campaigns have all tried to reject the European Court of Justice’s “definition of the human embryo as the beginning of the development of the human being.”
Hence “One of Us” is asking the EU “to end the financing of activities which presuppose the destruction of human embryos, in particular in the areas of research, development aid and public health,” as the initiative explanation reads.
But Maria Grazia Colombo, the Italian committee’s spokesperson told Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano that “now there is another tougher goal that needs to be achieved: the one million signatures than need to be gathered on a European scale. At the moment we have 510,000, so we’re half way there.”
The statistics published show two contrasting scenarios: On the one hand there are countries which have exceeded the minimum number of required signatures in favour of protecting human life from conception by a long way (Hungary 291,56, Italy Poland 266,59, Austria 202,32, Slovakia 184,13, Spain 100,51) and on the other there are countries with very low rates of success (Greece 0,32, Cyprus 0,38, Bulgaria 1,36 and Finland 3,06, Germany 24,15 and Portugal 43,91).
The “One of Us” petition proposed by European citizens asks for the “legal protection of the dignity, the right to life and the integrity of every human being from the moment of conception.” The European Citizen’s Initiative is a new instrument of participative democracy introduced by the Treaty of Lisbon.