Leden Europees Parlement zien af van zachte quota voor spreiding nationaliteiten in Europese diplomatieke dienst (en)
EUOBSERVER i / BRUSSELS - MEPs in the legal affairs committee have ditched a proposal for the European External Action Service (EEAS) to hire set targets of people from new member states.
The vote in Strasbourg on Monday evening (18 October) saw a large majority of deputies adopt by show of hands a report on EEAS staff regulations by German centre-left MEP Bernhard Rapkay which says the new service should ensure an "appropriate and meaningful presence of nationals from all the member states."
But they declined to consider an amendment obliging EEAS chief Catherine Ashton i to give privileged treatment for diplomats from new EU countries over the next 10 years in order to redress the gross imbalance in personnel in the EU's existing foreign relations machine.
The dud clause, which spoke of "indicative recruitment targets," had earlier won backing in the foreign affairs committee.
Polish daily Rzeczpospolita reports that Mr Rapkay rustled up support from MEPs from old EU countries in the various political groups in order to kill the idea. Ms Ashton's top advisors also hated the proposal, saying that people should be hired on the basis of merit instead of 'political correctness'.
The European Parliament will on Wednesday vote in plenary on the Rapkay text and on budgetary affairs committee plans to give the assembly greater oversight on EEAS spending. The plenary decision is to pave the way for Ms Ashton to launch the EEAS on 1 December as originally planned.
The Rapkay paper also frees Ms Ashton to employ specialists in the crisis-management, security and IT sectors from outside the EU institutions in "exceptional cases" where suitable candidates from the European Commission, the EU Council and EU countries' foreign ministries cannot be found.
Member states' diplomats are to enjoy the same pay and perks as EU civil servants in contracts valid for between eight and 10 years. And Ms Ashton is to take "appropriate measures" to help more women win EEAS posts.
For her part, Ms Ashton in a written statement quoted by the EU parliament's Monday press release pledged to "examine how to take the often non-linear patterns of female application better into account in future appointment procedures."
The foreign affairs chief had in an earlier letter to MEPs noted that few women have so far been chosen to fill EEAS ambassador posts because their CVs often contained significant breaks in their careers.
Ms Ashton's spokeswoman, Maja Kocijancic, told EUobserver that the problem is not linked to maternity leave. "In some member states you can take a year or more of maternity leave and it doesn't count as a break in your professional career. But you might have a situation where a woman has three kids and decides to stay at home until they are 10 and it is not covered by maternity leave, or a couple where they are both professionals and a husband gets a post somewhere and the wife goes with him for a period of four years and then you have a break in her career," she said.
The indicative recruitment clause could in theory be retabled for Wednesday's plenary vote. But an EU parliament official said the move is "highly unlikely" because Mr Rapkay's report has already won approval from the Belgian EU presidency.
A study by the Polish Institute for Foreign Relations in August noted that Belgian, British, Dutch, Italian, French, German and Spanish men currently hold almost 90 out of the EU's 115 ambassador posts abroad. New member states have two, while women hold 11 heads of delegation positions.