“All On Board” from a withdrawn proposal to a registered ECI

On 17 July 2026, the European Commission registered All On Board – For your right to citizenship without borders – a European Citizens’ Initiative led by the ECIT Foundation that asks the EU to guarantee every citizen the right to learn about, experience, and have recognised their European citizenship. It’s a milestone years in the making, and one that involved a significant legal rebuild along the way – with pro bono support from an international law firm.

ECIT, a Brussels-based think tank working to turn European citizenship into a lived reality rather than a legal abstraction, has argued for years that citizenship education deserves the same institutional weight as other EU rights. The European Parliament has said as much in multiple resolutions, and the citizens’ panels convened under the Conference on the Future of Europe backed the idea too. But resolutions don’t bind member states, and delivery across the EU has remained inconsistent – well short of ambitions like an “Erasmus for All” model of civic learning.

ECIT’s first attempt at turning that ambition into EU law was an earlier ECI proposal built around Articles 21 and 25 TFEU. The Commission accepted that the proposal had a valid legal basis – itself a meaningful signal – but it ran into familiar ECI obstacles: doubts about public comprehension, subsidiarity concerns about the EU legislating into national education systems, and, most fundamentally, how such a right could actually be enforced once member states were on the hook to deliver it. Rather than push a proposal that legal advice suggested couldn’t be enforced as drafted, ECIT withdrew it and went back to the drawing board.

That’s where Pro Publico matched ECIT with a pro bono legal team of one of the main international law firms. The brief was specific: ECIT needed legal analysis that went beyond the ECI Forum‘s formal guidance – strategic legal support to solve the enforceability problem the first version had run into. Working with Tony Venables at ECIT, the legal team helped rebuild the proposal around enforceable secondary legislation, drawing on precedent for how the EU has made citizenship-adjacent rights binding at national level, rather than relying on non-binding institutional commitments.

The redesigned initiative that resulted is broader than the original: it asks the Commission to establish three complementary rights for every EU citizen – to learn about European rights, values and democratic participation; to experience Europe through at least one meaningful mobility opportunity; and to have that learning recognised, with academic, technical, vocational and transversal qualifications recognised equally across the Union. As part of implementation, the initiative also proposes that every citizen receive a European Citizenship Statute at age 16, backed by a Centre of Excellence for Teacher Training and a network of European Citizens’ Houses.

That redesign has now paid off: the European Commission registered the initiative on 17 July 2026. Registration confirms the Commission has found the initiative doesn’t manifestly fall outside its power to propose legislation – clearing the way for the next, much more public phase. Organisers now have one year to collect one million validated signatures from citizens across at least seven member states before the Commission is legally required to respond.

ECIT has framed “All On Board” as a youth-led, grassroots campaign. While coordinated from Brussels, organisers are inviting young people across Europe to shape and promote the initiative in their own communities – aiming not just at the one-million-signature threshold but at building a lasting culture of civic engagement. A Brussels Summer School brought together young people, educators, civil society organisations and institutional partners to help shape the movement before signature collection formally begins.

The work isn’t finished. Over the coming months, ECIT and its partners will focus on building coalitions across Europe, expanding its network of Youth Task Forces, and preparing the practical machinery of a continent-wide signature campaign – including, per ECIT’s original brief to Pro Publico, further legal work on the implementing legislation that would sit behind the ECI if it succeeds.

For Pro Publico, this case is a good illustration of what pro bono legal support can add to an ECI beyond the Commission’s own advisory channel. The ECI Forum gives organisers neutral procedural guidance, but it doesn’t solve the kind of substantive legal design problem ECIT ran into: how do you draft a right that’s enforceable rather than aspirational? That’s the gap the pro bono team was able to fill – turning a withdrawn proposal into a registered initiative with a credible legislative model behind it.

There’s a precedent question here too. If “All On Board” succeeds in demonstrating that an ECI can carry genuine legislative feasibility rather than just a political ask, it offers a template other citizen-led initiatives could follow – at a moment when ECIs are frequently criticised for raising expectations they have no legal mechanism to meet.

Do you need legal or advocacy support to advance a public interest?

👉 Submit your case via our intake form

📬 Subscribe to our newsletter

🔍 Explore other impact stories