Dear Europeans,

In the next session, the Constitutional Convention will set up six working groups. This will finally give space to the Convention Members to discuss the key questions about our future European Union. The Convention is therefore approaching its crucial phase, moving away from general and rather internal debates to tackle the hot issues of the ongoing EU reforms.

There is still quite some ambiguity about the structure of these working
groups. Especially the chairing of the meeting has been discussed quite
controversially with some Members favouring only Presidium Members to chair whereas others called for a more open structure. Obviously, the question of the openness of meetings is even more crucial. Baring the legitimate criticism about the European summit meetings in mind, it is absolutely vital to keep the Convention meetings open. The Convention has to stay accessible for the European citizens and has to allow contributions in substance by the Civil Society, be it organised or not. Only an open Convention reflecting the needs and interests of the citizens has a chance to overcome the main deficits of the current Union - its distance to citizens, its lack of transparency and the denial of Europe as a common political project.

One of the working groups will deal with the question of subsidiarity.
As this is certainly one of the key issues in the ongoing debate and
especially in people's support for the Union, we would like to dedicate this bulletin's edition to this topic. We are discussing whether European
subsidiarity can be simply a system of governing "on the lowest effective
and useful level", or much more sophisticated than that. Catalunya gives us a concrete example of what subsidiarity means. In this week's interview, German Convention Member Erwin Teufel also considers the question of subsidiarity as one of the crucial issues in the ongoing EU reform.

We hope that you enjoy reading this edition and would like to invite you to become part of our Bulletin team. If you want to contribute to the
next edition, please send your article to convention@jef-europe.net
(deadline for the 8th issue is 27th May). As usual, you can see all articles of this Bulletin in full length on the Youth Convention Homepage:
www.constitional-convention.net . If you wish to comment on any articles,
feel free to do so in our online-discussion-forum.

Best European greetings,

Your Editors.