EU Commission Refuses to Register the 'Save Europe Act' as Citizens’ Initiative

The European Commission has refused to register the Save Europe Act as a European Citizens’ Initiative, preventing its organisers from beginning the formal process of collecting signatures across the European Union.

The application was submitted on 8 June 2026 by a group represented by Eva Vlaardingerbroek and Martin Sellner. Vlaardingerbroek subsequently published the Commission’s rejection on X. The Commission ("EC"/"the Commission") issued a preliminary assessment on 24 June, received the organisers’ response five days later, and published its final refusal on 22 July.

A European Citizens’ Initiative does not itself create legislation. Registration would have allowed the organisers to seek one million signatures, including the required minimum numbers in at least seven EU Member States. Had that threshold been reached, the Commission would have been required to consider the proposal and issue a formal response, although it would not have been obliged to introduce the legislation requested.

What did the Save Europe Act propose?

The initiative called upon the Commission to propose temporary restrictions on new “non-Western immigration channels”, including family reunification and study visas, while undertaking a broader reform of EU migration and asylum policy.

According to the Commission’s description of the initiative, the Act (petition) also seeks stronger external border protection, faster screening and return procedures, and the “systematic and accelerated remigration” of illegal migrants, rejected asylum seekers and other categories of non-European migrants whose continued presence was said to impose a serious burden upon Member States.

It further proposed mutual recognition of return decisions between Member States, stronger agreements with third countries over the readmission of their nationals, and the removal of welfare incentives said to encourage further migration. These objectives are recorded in recital 3 of the Commission’s decision, and reproduced, here.

These measures appear proportionate given since the start of the 2015 refugee crisis, between 11 and 13 million individuals have sought asylum or temporary protection across Europe, driven primarily by conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan, and, asylum visa exploitation of those conflicts. Schengen countries, which form part of the borderless free movement zone of the EU, in recent years have attempted to naturalise illegal entrants. Spain's government recently approved plans to give legal status to 500,000 undocumented migrants, allowing them to be integrated formally into the EU, and providing a weakest link entry point for other Schengen countries. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez described his government's decision as both "an act of justice" and a necessity for Spain.

In light of this, the Save Europe Act's objectives appear proportionate to the problem at hand within the EU. The Commission accepted that the organisers had fulfilled the formal requirements governing the composition and representation of an initiative, yet, issued rejection. The application was not rejected because of an administrative defect of some variety, rather, it was rejected because the Commission considered its substance incompatible with the fundamental values and rights of the European Union, as recorded in recital 4 of the decision. If this is so, how may EU citizens meaningfully petition this urgent demographic issue and blind-spot for within the union?

Why was registration refused?

The Commission regarded the proposed moratorium as the foundation of the entire initiative. It stated that “all the proposed objectives” had as their starting point the restriction upon new non-Western immigration.

It then considered the language used by the organisers to explain the policy. The full text of the application can be viewed, here, and does not appear to be either inflammatory or improper in its English translation. The initiative referred to the “ethnic and cultural continuity” of the “native peoples of Europe”, and described large-scale migration in terms of “demographic replacement”.

From these phrases, the Commission concluded that the proposed distinction was not genuinely based upon immigration-management considerations, such as nationality, visa category or legal status. Instead, it deemed that the proposal distinguished between migrants according to their ethnic, cultural or civilisational origin, and was thus improper. A uniquely EU form of administrative rejection.

The central finding was expressed in the following terms:

“It is thus manifestly contrary to Article 21 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (see, to that effect, judgment of 6 September 2017, Slovakia and Hungary v Council, C-643/15 and C-647/15, EU:C:2017:631, paragraph 305) and to the values enshrined in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU), upon which the Union is founded.”

This appears in recital 5 of the Commission’s rejection.

Article 21 of the Charter prohibits discrimination on grounds including race and ethnic origin. Article 2 TEU identifies human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights as foundational values of the Union.

The organisers had argued that the phrase “non-Western” referred exclusively to external migration and third-country nationals. The Commission rejected that interpretation, reasoning that the initiative specifically targeted persons of “non-European” or “non-Western” origin.

That part of the decision is notably brief. It does not consider in detail whether the proposal might have been re-framed by reference to nationality, country of citizenship, visa route or another formally non-racial legal category. It treats the language and stated purpose of the initiative as determining the legal character of the proposed moratorium on migration.

National identity & EU values

The organisers also relied upon Article 4(2) TEU, under which the Union must respect the national identities of its Member States. They argued that the preservation of the cultural and demographic continuity of European peoples fell within that protection. This would seem, to most observers, to be one of the core and stated purposes of the EU from its inception.

Relying upon the Court of Justice’s judgment in Commission v Hungary, C-769/22, the Commission replied that Article 4(2) protects:

“only a view of the national identities which is consistent with the values enshrined in Article 2 TEU”.

It therefore held that national identity could not justify a broad restriction upon immigration which it had already classified as being based upon ethnic origin. This reasoning appears in recital 7 of the decision.

This is one of the more constitutionally significant parts of the decision; in effect, national identity can receive protection under Article 4 only after the particular framing/definition of national identity has been found compatible/consistent with the Union’s foundational values. A revealing statement from the Commission, in which it may set the terms of these matters as it wishes.

The effect of the decision

Under Article 6 of Regulation 2019/788, the Commission may refuse registration where an initiative is “manifestly contrary” to the values contained in Article 2 TEU or to rights protected by the Charter.

The Commission concluded that this threshold was met and refused registration in full. It did not separately register those parts of the proposal concerning illegal migration, rejected asylum seekers, border enforcement, readmission agreements or welfare eligibility.

The principal criticism of the decision is therefore not simply that the Commission disagreed with the Save Europe Act, at least not outrught. It treated the organisers’ language concerning Western and non-Western migration as a racial or ethnic classification, and then treated every connected border, return and welfare proposal as inseparable from that classification.

Registration would not have enacted the Save Europe Act as a matter of EU policy. It would have permitted European citizens to decide whether the proposal deserved sufficient support, in the form of signatures in favour, to receive formal consideration for policymaking. The Commission instead concluded that the initiative was legally incapable of entering that democratic process.

The decision relies upon the EU Charter and the Union’s own constitutional values, rather than upon the European Convention on Human Rights. Although Article 6(2) TEU states that the Union “shall accede” to the Convention, the EU has still not completed that accession.

I have argued elsewhere that this was political by design, and an attempt for the EU to evade requirements placed upon it during the emerging Syrian refugee crisis; more on that in this earlier article and in this wider paper on the ECHR and its relevance to the UK. In this instance, the EU is enjoying setting its own terms of engagement when dealing with migration-control activists, something it could not do without interference on accession to the ECHR.

A draft accession agreement between the EU and ECHR was rejected by the Court of Justice in Opinion 2/13 on 18 December 2014. Although negotiations later resumed, the accession process remains incomplete to this day.

That history does not dispose of the Commission’s legal argument here. It does, however, mean that the Union is invoking its internal fundamental-rights order to exclude a citizens’ initiative while EU institutions remain outside the direct external jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. One wonders how it would square this circle / balancing act were it subject to Article 10, ECHR, or indeed a domestic Free Speech Bill, like that suggested for Britain, here.

In short, the EU alone has made the call that registered initiatives within member states cannot advocate for the historic European population - at least not meaningfully in the realm of migration policy.