European Civil Service

The European Civil Service is a generic term applied to all staff serving the Institutions of the EU (the Commission, EU Council of Ministers, the European Council, the European Parliament). However, each Institution organises its own internal structures; only recruitment is done in common.

The rules, principles, standards and working conditions of the European civil service are set out in the Staff Regulations.

The European Ombudsman has summarised the following five principles of public service which apply to all staff of the EU institutions:

The Commission's civil service is headed by a Secretary General, currently Alexander Italianer who succeeded Catherine Day. in 2014. According to figures published by the Commission, 24,428 persons were employed by the Commission as officials and temporary agents in their 2016 budget. In addition to these, 9066 "external staff" were employed; these are largely people employed on time-limited contracts (called "contractual agents" in the jargon), staff seconded from national administrations (called "Detached National Experts"), or trainees (called "stagiaires"). The single largest DG is the Directorate-General for Translation, with 2261 staff.

European civil servants are sometimes referred to in the anglophone press as "Eurocrats" (a term coined by Richard Mayne, a journalist and personal assistant to the first Commission president, Walter Hallstein).; high-ranking officials are sometimes referred to as "European Mandarins".

There are staff from all member states, with the largest group being Belgian (17.8% – 4,193), with French and Italian servants following with about 2,500 (10%).

Most administration is based in the Belgian capital, Often, those states under-represented in the service tend to have more of their nationals in the higher ranks.

The qualifications needed to enter the European civil service depend on whether the job is a specialist one and the grade. One of the entry qualifications for the European civil service is that the candidate speak at least two of the official European languages, one of which must be English, French or German. Candidates whose mother tongue is English, French or German must pass the competition for entry in one of the other two official languages.

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Wikipedia