Electronic Petitioning and Modernisation of Petitioning Systems in Europe. Summary

After TAB had already presented a first report on the subject of electronic petitions in 2008 (No. 127), which dealt in particular with the pilot project "Public Petitions" of the German Bundestag, TAB Working Report No. 146 focuses on the further development of the e-petitions platform of the German Bundestag as well as other national petition procedures in Europe. It examines how the functioning, use and evaluation of the German Bundestag's e-petitions platform have developed after an initial fundamental modernisation in its fifth year of operation. For this purpose, among other things, extensive surveys of petitioners were conducted. In addition, it was of interest to see how the online procedure of the German Petitions Committee, which in the opinion of TAB has been successfully established, compares with corresponding activities in Europe. To this end, an extensive survey was conducted on the parliamentary petition and ombudsman bodies in the 27 member states of the EU as well as Norway and Switzerland and also a separate country study on the petition and ombudsman system in Great Britain, including Scotland and Wales.
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The report contains a wealth of concrete suggestions for improving the current petition system and discusses three further, medium-term development options with their advantages and disadvantages for the petition system of the German Bundestag:
> the general publicity of petitions,
> the introduction of a national parliamentary ombudsman for personal complaints, and
> the further development of the petition system in the direction of an instrument of direct democracy.