The EESC issues between 160 and 190 opinions and information reports a year.
It also organises several annual initiatives and events with a focus on civil society and citizens’ participation such as the Civil Society Prize, the Civil Society Days, the Your Europe, Your Say youth plenary and the ECI Day.
Here you can find news and information about the EESC'swork, including its social media accounts, the EESC Info newsletter, photo galleries and videos.
The EESC brings together representatives from all areas of organised civil society, who give their independent advice on EU policies and legislation. The EESC's326 Members are organised into three groups: Employers, Workers and Various Interests.
The EESC has six sections, specialising in concrete topics of relevance to the citizens of the European Union, ranging from social to economic affairs, energy, environment, external relations or the internal market.
This own-initiative opinion stresses that any kind of violence against women is a violation of women’s human rights. The EESC believes Directive 2024/1385/EU on combating violence against women and domestic violence should address all forms of violence against women and calls for sexual violence and rape to be included as a form of violence and criminalised based on the absence of consent. Highlights that any kind of violence against women is a significant public and clinical health concern, while stressing the multiple and intersectional discrimination suffered by women with disabilities.
The EESC denounces the deterioration of human rights, the rule of law, and democracy, and calls for further improvements of the Commission's Annual Rule of Law Reports. Among others, it recommends that the Commission ensures meaningful involvement of civil society in both the preparation and follow-up stages of the report at the national level, and expands the Report’s section on CSOs. The Commission's assessment should be based on objective benchmarks and transparent dialogue with CSOs and the Commission needs to develop more precise and measurable country-specific recommendations with clear benchmarks, indicators and deadlines.
Following in the steps of the recommendations presented by Enrico Letta in his report on the Single Market, the opinion aims at proposing concrete measures on how to help reconcile the needs of social economy enterprises with the application of State Aid rules, taking into account existing good practices at national level.
Download — Dictamen del CESE: How to support social economy entities in line with State aid rules: thoughts following the suggestions in Enrico Letta’s report
This subject of this own-initiative opinion is multidimensional, requiring from the opinion to address a wide spectrum of subtopics, while having a clear and logical thread.
Confronted with increasing instability, increased strategic competition and growing security threats, the EU committed to taking greater responsibility for its security and to taking further decisive action to build open European sovereignty, reduce its dependencies and develop a new growth and investment model for 2030 and beyond.
The opinion aims to examine the economic development of candidate countries and the potential effects of enlargement on the EU Single Market. This opinion is part of a pilot project involving Enlargement Candidate Members in the preparatory work.