Short explanatory guide to the changes for Statutes and RoP

This guide presents the proposals in a brief and compact way. It clusters them into three basic ideas. The guide explains the motivation behind them as well as the intended outcome. While the general ideas behind the proposals are quite simple and straightforward, in order to implement these ideas both the Statutes (8 amendments) and the Rules of Procedure (RoP) (5 amendments) have to be adapted. 1. Election of members of the Executive Board (EB) by the European Congress Currently, the President, the two Vice-Presidents, and the Treasurer are elected by the European Congress, while at least four members of the EB are elected by the Federal Committee (FC). This... is a cumbersome process, because these EB members need to be first elected into the FC by the European Congress, before they can be elected as EB members by the FC, discriminates unnecessarily by having EB members with different sources of democratic legitimacy, partly deprives the European Congress of its most important power: the election of the executive body. The proposal is to let these EB members be directly elected by the European Congress just like the President, the Vice-Presidents, and the Treasurer. This will... simplify the electoral procedure and make it more transparent, strengthen the legitimacy of the EB members, increase the powers of the European Congress. 2. Election of direct FC members by the European Congress for specific roles in the FC Currently, the European Congress elects 20 direct FC delegates, without specifying their role in the FC. This... diffuses responsibility and accountability, because of a large number of direct delegates who could step in and perform a specific task, leads to many candidates running for office without a clear idea of what they want to be doing in their term, emphasizes other criteria than competence and motivation. The proposal is to give the European Congress the power to elect direct delegates for specific positions. These are: the Presidium and one chair and one co-chair for each PC. This will... increase the sense of responsibility and accountability of direct delegates through smaller PC chairs and a smaller number of delegates overall, encourage PC and WG chairs to reach out more to the broader JEF community for (wo)man power, encourage direct delegates to be active in both a PC and a WG,

emphasize the competence and motivation of candidates for specific tasks in the FC, strengthen the delegates' legitimacy for their task within the FC through a direct election by the European Congress, increase competition for positions within the FC by reducing the positions that currently have to be 'filled up', simplify and make more reasonable how the number of direct delegates is calculated, namely according to specific positions within the FC, and not as it is right now inversely proportional to the number of national sections.

3. Separation of executive and legislative powers Currently, the President and the two Vice-Presidents are FC members with voting rights. This weakens the role of the FC as a legislative body with the task to control the EB. It isn't healthy for any organisation to let the EB partly control its own policy and financial management. The proposal is to make all EB members non-voting members of the FC. As a result, national and direct delegates would be the only members with voting rights in the FC. This will... strengthen the FC's control over the EB ensure that all EB members are part of the FC and, thus, accountable to it in their role as EB members.