Countering the spread of disinformation and foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) in democratic debate and processes

A child protection policy is a mandatory annex for all participants with activities directly involving children (i.e. persons below age of 18). Hence, each organisation involved in the project and having direct (in person or online) contact with minors needs to supply its own child protection policy.

Public entities (e.g. local authorities, ministries,...) can satisfy this obligation by submitting a declaration from their legal representatives stating that the child protection measures of the public entity are in line with the principles and standards described in the Keeping Children Safe Child Safeguarding StandardsPDF (available at: https://commission.europa.eu/system/files/2023-10/KCS-CS-Standards-ENG-200218.pdf).

Yes. According to the call document, entities without legal personality under their national law may exceptionally participate, if their representatives have the capacity to undertake legal obligations on their behalf, and offer guarantees for the protection of the EU financial interests equivalent to that offered by legal persons (see Article 197(2)(c) EU Financial Regulation 2018/1046).

At the application stage, such applicant should supply documents proving operational capacity (in line with section Operational capacity of the Call document), notably:

• general profiles (qualifications and experiences) of the staff responsible for managing and implementing the project
• description of the consortium participants
• applicants’ activity reports of last year
• list of previous projects (key projects for the last 4 years).

As indicated in the Call Document, organisations (applicant and partners) must be established in eligible countries. International organisations are also eligible, even if established in non-eligible countries. However, the project activities must take place only in eligible countries. For the calculation of the lump sum, only participants coming from eligible countries can be counted, and this also applies to International Organisations. Participants in an event do not need to ‘represent’ a partner, they can also come from other eligible countries than the ones involved in the consortium.

Beneficiaries (BEN) are the legal entities involved in the action that are parties to the grant agreement. As signatories of the grant agreement, they are fully responsible towards the granting authority for implementing the project and for complying with all the obligations stated in the grant agreement.

Affiliated entity (AE) is an organisation that has a link with a beneficiary (in particular a capital or legal link), which is NOT limited to the action or established for the sole purpose of implementing it. Affiliated entities participate in the action with similar rights and obligations as the beneficiaries (obligation to implement action tasks and right to charge costs and claim contributions). Since affiliated entities receive a part of the grant, they must comply with all the call conditions and be validated (just like beneficiaries).

Associated partners (AP) are the entities, which participate in the action, but without the right to charge costs or claim contributions. Since they participate without funding, they do not need to be validated.

Attention! Affiliated entities and Associated partners are NOT considered as beneficiaries, because they do not sign a grant agreement. Therefore, they do not count towards the minimum eligibility criteria for consortium composition (if any).

Before applying for funding, all organisations involved in the project (all members of the consortia) must first be registered with the EU. See Registration steps for a whole explanation on how to register an organisation.

All information related to registration of an organisation can be found here:webgate.ec.europa.eu

No, there is no binding template under the CERV and the JUST programmes for the written consortium agreement. However, once the proposal is selected for funding, members of consortia must conclude a written consortium agreement.

For more details concerning its content, please consult CERV Model Grant AgreementPDF (p.28-29), CERV Lump Sum Model Grant AgreementPDF (p. 21) resp. JUST LS Model Grant AgreementPDF (p.21) and Annotated Grant AgreementPDF(article 7).

The EU Survey on Justice, Rights and Values is part of the performance monitoring framework put in place by DG JUST to collect monitoring data and results to ensure the sound management of its funding programmes, public accountability and transparency. It will aim at measuring the quality of the training, mutual learning and awareness-raising events funded under the call for proposals.

Each beneficiary will be requested to ask the attendees of the events organised in the framework of his project to participate in the EU Survey. Beneficiaries will have access to the results and will be able to use them for their project evaluation.

DG JUST will aggregate the results of all the projects financed under the Justice and CERV programmes.

The survey is made of two parts:

• the first one is a usual satisfaction questionnaire aiming at measuring the quality and the impacts of the event organised;
• the second one intends to gather attendees’ perception of the values promoted by the Justice and CERV programmes and measure attendees’ awareness of the different instruments used to promote and protect rights and values.

The following personal data is collected if the respondent agrees:

• name and surname, gender, age category and e-mail address of the respondent,
• the name type and of the organisation on whose behalf the respondent is contributing, and the country of establishment

Protection of personal data is ensured all along the process. The respondent can refuse to give these data but just give his/her answer to the question in an anonymised way.

An organisation can submit only one proposal as a lead applicant (i.e. “Coordinator”) under this Call for proposals, across all priorities/topics; and may participate in multiple proposals as a co-applicant (i.e. "Partner").

The minimum number of participants and countries required to be qualify for the pre-fixed lump sums are:

• 25 participants from 1 country (for the in-situ events/lump sums); and
• 101 participants from 2 countries (for the online events/lump sums).

If the number of participants and countries is lower, no financing can be granted for respective lump sum/Work Package.

Please refer to the Lump Sum DecisionPDF with all prefixed amounts and related numbers of participants and countries (tables 1 and 2).

The lump sums for in-situ and online events are based on 2 parameters:

• the number of direct participants: number of participants directly involved in the entire event. If a participant is involved in different activities of the same event, s/he must only be counted once; AND
• the number of eligible countries: number of countries of habitual residence of direct participants. Only eligible countries must be counted.

The grant cannot finance the entire cost of the project, beneficiaries may bear additional costs which are not captured by the Union contribution. As explained in the Decision authorizing the use of lump sums,PDF the contributions amounts have been defined taking into account the principle of co-financing. As respect of the co-financing principle is generally assumed in the context of lump sum, applicants do not have to provide information about sources of funding other than the EU grant, nor they have to specify a co-financing percentage.

In the Call CERV-2026-CITIZENS-CIV the lump sum budget for the project has to be filled directly online in the Application Form Part A.

In the section 'Work packages' (WP) please introduce one line per each WP by filling the Lump Sum (LS) parameters 'Event type' In-situ/online, 'number of participants' and 'number of countries' participants come from.

The corresponding prefixed LS amount will automatically appear in the section ‘Beneficiary Calculation Sheet’, by beneficiary (partner). LS amounts will be repeated for each beneficiary and are the reference for each WP. Please fill the "Requested EU contribution" for each beneficiary and for each WP (Requested EU contribution per WP cannot exceed the LS value).

To have an overview of the prefixed Lump sum amounts please refer to the p.13 of the "DECISION authorizing the use of lump sums for actions under the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values Programme (2021-2027)PDF", with all the amounts defined by its parameters.

You can also use the 'old' LS budget calculatorExcel to help you to build your project budget.

NO. You can submit your proposal and annexes in any official EU language (project abstract/summary should however always be in English). For reasons of efficiency, we strongly advise you to use English for the main part of the application (Part B).

All CERV and JUST calls define their award criteria under section 9. Award criteria of the Call document. Call-specific requirements are outlined in its section 2. Objectives — Themes and priorities — Activities that can be funded — Expected impact. Moreover, additional drafting instructions are included in Part B of the application form.

Applicants must be mindful of all the above parameters, while preparing their proposals.

Practice shows that proposals surpassing the minimum overall quality threshold of 70 points (and which can be considered for funding) are those with:

clear and direct response to the call’s objectives;

a strong focus on issue(s) in which there is a general interest at national / EU-level;

a clearly established link with the EU policy priorities;

clearly defined and realistic project’s objectives, which then translate into concrete activities supported by a clear methodology and in practical and useful outputs;

the potential to have a real impact on the target group(s). This should come hand in hand with a well-defined and appropriate choice of the target group(s) by the project partners bearing in mind the need to have access to these target groups to involve them actively and meaningfully in the project design and its activities;

a good prospect for sustainability and/or long-term impact lasting beyond EU funding (e.g., the project results have a clear potential to be used by the partners and other relevant target groups at national/EU level in their daily practices; changes will continue to resonate after the project ends);

meaningful partnership composition, fit for achieving proposal objectives, where partners have experience in the field, access to the target group(s) and support of relevant public authorities;

all relevant cross-cutting aspects (e.g., respect to EU values, child protection principles, gender mainstreaming perspective, data protection rules, etc.) appropriately covered and clearly described – as these are often only briefly touched upon by applicants. Hence, properly addressing these can really make a difference; and

innovative solution(s) proposed (i.e., featuring new or alternative approaches to recurrent or new problem(s)) or covering geographical areas where the type of activity proposed by the project is clearly missing).

The degree of fulfilment of the above characteristics can differentiate good proposals from the excellent ones.

To gender mainstream your proposal, please consider the guiding questions below to integrate a gender perspective into your project:

• Did I conduct a gender equality analysis to assess my project’s design, implementation and impact?
• Did I take into account gender aspects in my needs assessment?
• Will the data and indicators I collect and create be disaggregated by sex?
• Did I include in my proposal a commitment to advance gender equality?
• Did I include in my proposal a commitment to monitor and report on the gender equality results achieved by the project in the evaluation phase?
• Do I plan to create gender-specific indicators to measure the project’s gender equality objectives?

Questions 1-5 are considered basic elements of a gender-mainstreamed proposal. Question 6, is designed for projects, which put gender equality at their core.

Additional guidance can be found on: What is Gender mainstreaming | EIGE (europa.eu) and Gender analysis | EIGE (europa.eu)

NO. The maximum page limit for proposal (Part B) set in the Call document ensures equal treatment of all applicants.

All excess pages detected by the system will be blanked. Therefore, the applicants need to make sure to respect this limitation before converting the application Part B document into a PDF and uploading it via the Submission wizard.

NO. Applicants are asked NOT to delete any instructions in the document or any formal sections of the application. Formatting rules should be abided (i.e., Arial 9 points as minimum font size to fill-up the application). Any alterations of the application template must be avoided, to prevent the risk of inadmissibility of the application.

The KPI tool allows the Commission to systematically and reliably collect data related to the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of the CERV and Justice programmes.

The previously used “Part C (KPI)” form has been recently replaced by the “KPI tool”. The KPI tool is designed to collect data on the number of persons (male/female/non-binary) participating as attendees to – or that are reached by – a specific activity.

The same KPI tool is used throughout the whole project lifecycle, starting from the stage of proposal submission (SEP) and, if selected, continuing with grant agreement preparation (GAP) and reporting stages (REPA).

Data is preloaded from SEP (submission) to GAP (grant preparation) and from GAP to REPA (reporting); project coordinators can update data from estimates (at application stage) to actual data (at reporting).

When preparing their application, applicants indicate two types of information (i.e. two fields):

1.The type of project.

2.The indicators on the number of persons reached by 3 main types of activities.

1. First field “Type of project” (main activity)

The projects funded under the CERV and the Justice programmes usually include different types of activities. To contribute to the Commission own reporting duties, applicants are requested to classify their project according to its main set of activities (i.e. the main mean to reach the objective). Even if several types of activities will be implemented, applicants must choose one of the five “labels” amongst the given options: mutual learning and exchange of good practices, training, ICT tools, awareness-raising information and dissemination, analytical activities. Only one choice is allowed. This does not change the nature of the project and does not prevent to implement a mix of activities, but it allows for an easier Commission reporting.

2. Second field “Output, result and impact indicators”

This second field aims at recording the number of persons participating in or reached by three types of activities: training, awareness-raising and mutual learning.

A project can foresee different types of activities under the main one. For instance, an analytical project could include an expert workshop (mutual learning) and an information event (awareness-raising). Therefore, while labelled as “analytical” as type of project in the first field, this second field should be filled in for each type of event targeting participants through training, awareness-raising or mutual learning, which can be chosen independently of the choice made for the type of project. The related activity field can be left empty (i.e. value = 0) only if no such activity is planned or takes place within the framework of the project.

The number of persons by type of activity is cumulative, and it includes also the activities implemented by third parties (i.e. for projects with regranting).

At application stage, these numbers are based on estimates; if the project is selected and awarded a grant, actual data is provided at reporting stage.

Additional definitions:

Training:

Training activities may be classroom training or e-learning courses as well as staff exchanges, study visits, workshops and seminars.

The number of persons reached is the number of trainees who have registered to the training module.

Persons who participate in the preparation of the training (e.g. in the needs assessments or research activity) are not considered as trainees.

Persons who participate in the follow-up of the training (e.g. dissemination activities, conference, etc.) are not considered as trainees.

A person who participates in more than 1 training activities is counted as many times as this person participated in different training activities.

Mutual learning and exchange of good practices:

Mutual learning and exchanges of good practices activities may be meetings, workshops, seminars, webinars, online platforms, expert groups, peer-learning, networking, study visits and all other activities that provide the opportunity to identify and learn from good practices in other Member States, other regions or in other sector of activities.

The number of persons reached is the number of men, women and non-binary individuals directly taking part in the activities.

Persons who participate in the dissemination of the mutual learning activity (e.g. press conferences, information folder receivers, etc.) or people touched by media communication activities (e.g. radio broadcast) are not considered as directly taking part in the mutual learning activity.

A person who participates in more than 1 mutual learning activities is counted as many times as this person participated in different mutual learning activities.

Participants to focus groups fall under this category.

Awareness-raising:

Awareness raising, information and dissemination activities are conferences, press conferences, media campaigns (including online), publications and all activities aimed at raising awareness, informing and promoting the debate in the areas of the programme.

The number of persons reached is the number of men, women and non-binary individuals touched [once or several times by one or several means] by these activities.

There is no binding template for a Child protection policy (CPP), since situation of each organisation is unique. However, it must be covering the four areas (policy, people, procedures, accountability) described in the Keeping Children Safe Child Safeguarding StandardsPDF. Moreover, the CPP must be available online and transparent to everyone who comes in contact with the organisation. It must include clear information about the recruitment of staff (including trainees and volunteers) and include background checks (vetting). It must also include clear procedures and rules to staff, including reporting rules, and continuous training.

The Eurochild Child Protection PolicyPDF is a suitable example.

No. In case an organisation is working with young people in the age group 18-29, Child protection policy is not needed, since children are considered as persons below age of 18. Please note that terms youth, teenagers or young people without age precision are quite vague. Therefore, the applicants are encouraged to clearly specify the targeted age group in the abstract and all through the proposal.

The context of CERV and JUST Programmes relates – primarily - to activities aimed at reaching persons (for example trainings, workshops). For this reason, Part C relevant to CERV and JUST Programmes does not allow inserting indicators for Analytical activities or ICT Tool.

The financial capacity check is done only in case a proposal is selected for funding. It is normally performed for all coordinators with exception of public bodies (entities established as public body under national law, including local, regional or national authorities) and international organisations. If needed, it may also be done for affiliated entities. Before the grant agreement preparation, the applicants will be approached by the Commission with the list of documents to supply.

For more information consult Rules for Legal Entity Validation, LEAR Appointment and Financial Capacity AssessmentPDF, which provides guiding principles concerning financial capacity check in its part IV. RULES ON FINANCIAL CAPACITY ASSESSMENT (pp. 21-26).

Work packages must include at least one activity that gathers citizens, actively engages them, and encourages their participation. For example, simply viewing an online ad, visiting a website, attending an exhibition, watching a movie screening, or participating in a street activity would not be considered as direct and active engagement of participants. Please ensure that your work packages include activities that offer participants opportunities to express their opinions, collaborate, and engage in debate. For example, a work package may include a movie screening followed by a closing Q&A or debate session with the attending audience. The attendance at the Q&A or debate would be considered in this case towards the parameters of the lump sum.

Defining work packages involves grouping project activities into logical and distinct major sub-divisions covering specific topic or scope. The use of lump sum funding should not lead to the fragmentation of the project into numerous small work packages.

A WP/event is one or a series of activities, not necessarily performed on the same day or in one country, aiming to gather direct and verifiable representatives of the target group(s) to discuss a thematic defined in advance.

Yes. After completing the registration of an organisation (and obtaining a PIC), the Self-registrant role will be assigned to the user logged into EU Login at the time of registration. The Self-registrant is allowed to access the PIC in the Funding & Tenders Portal and update the organisation data.

The evaluation methodology (evaluation criteria for relevance, quality and impact) is designed to reflect “Rights of the child/Child protection policies” dimension. Consequently, (lack of) attention to rights of a child/child protection policies dimension may have an impact on the score a proposal receives in the evaluation.

Notably, if a project has a direct or indirect impact on children and their rights, the project should address children as rights holders and should ensure their participation in the design and implementation of the project.

As provided by the Decision authorising the use of lump sumsPDF, the lump-sums for events already include the costs related to coordination, management, evaluation, communication, etc.