Shake-up of staff causes friction in institutions

Date: 12/10/00

THE new prominence given to justice and home affairs under the Amsterdam Treaty has had some interesting repercussions for staffing policy in two key EU institutions.

The European Commission has seen an entirely new directorate-general created to deal with justice and home affairs questions, while the Council of Ministers has had to cope with the arrival of a group of 'outsiders' from the former secretariat of the non-EU Schengen free-movement group. In both instances, the changes have not passed entirely without incident.

For the Commission, the problem has centred on the question of 'who's more important than who'. The new directorate-general's core team members have actually been working together for several years. They formed the old justice and home affairs 'task force' which was attached to the

Commission's secretariat-general after it was recognised as an official Union policy area by the 1993 Maastricht Treaty.

Now that the lowly task force has been elevated to the status of a full-blown directorate-general, many of these 'old-timers' apparently feel they are the most senior members of the new department. This view is not universally shared, however.

When the directorate-general was set up, several staff members were drafted in from other services to work in the new department. For example, a number of senior officials moved from the internal market directorate, where they had been in charge of customs questions and monitoring the Schengen agreement; others came from the race relations section of the social affairs department.

The newcomers considered themselves to be just as senior as the former task force staff, and several resented being made to feel like 'new kids on the block'. Insiders say the atmosphere within the new department has now calmed down somewhat, but admit things were somewhat tense in the early days.

At the Council of Ministers, the arrival of the Schengen officials caused even more of a stir than at the Commission, where the new directorate-general was created by transferring officials from one department to another. The Councilstaff, on the other hand, were faced with the arrival of a group of outsiders who had not previously worked for the EU institutions and had not taken the all-important entry exams (concours) which would-be

Eurocrats must pass.

Before the Amsterdam Treaty moved the Schengen pact into Union law, furious notes from the staff unions flew around the corridors of the

Council's pink marble headquarters calling on officials to protest against the arrival of the unqualified new-comers in the strongest possible terms.

In the end, though, the Schengen staff arrived, the world did not come to an end and everyone returned to business as usual.

The new prominence given to justice and home affairs under the Amsterdam Treaty has had some interesting repercussions for staffing policy in two key EU institutions.