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Poland held the Presidency of the European Union Council for 184 days. The time to sum things up has arrived.

Over that period, 452 meetings took place in Poland, including 20 informal meetings of the EU Council and ministerial meetings, 30 ministerial-level conferences and more than 300 expert conferences. Most of those events took place in Warsaw, Sopot, Wroclaw, Kraków and Poznan. In Brussels, 1,940 meetings were held including council and committee meetings.

All told, some 30,000 delegates came to Poland for meetings connected with the Presidency. 2,150 journalists were accredited and vehicles from the Presidency fleet chalked up 793,000 kilometres.

While holding the EU Presidency, Poland organised a rich range of cultural events at home and abroad with nearly 4,000 concerts, exhibitions and other artistic events. Events associated with the most important cultural event alone, the European Cultural Congress, attracted as many as 200,000 people.

The efficiency with which the Presidency was carried out was possible thanks to the involvement of well-trained experts and officials. Nearly 1,200 people were directly involved in the activities of the Polish Presidency.

The Presidency also posed a major linguistic challenge. Interpreters numbering 1,160 (360 in Poland and 800 in Brussels) had to translate from the 30 different languages used at the various meetings. Nearly 10,000 pages of documents connected with Presidency-related activities were translated.

The Presidency was also extremely active on the web. The Presidency’s website www.pl2011.eu was visited around 2,850,000 times, and recorded 470,000 users. More than 500 articles in the ‘News’ section were published on the pl2011.eu site.

Apart from its own website, the Presidency also made use of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and a special YouTube channel. On Facebook, the Polish Presidency profile has 31,000 fans, and the YouTube channel noted 328,000 hits. The film ‘Dobrodošli’ welcoming Croatia on the occasion of signing its EU Accession Treaty, was viewed 62,000 times (including 50,000 during the first 48 hours). During the meetings, delegates drank 200,000 bottles of mineral water and consumed 230 kilograms of ‘Krówka’ (caramel-fudge) sweets.

In January, the chairmanship of the European Union Council will be taken over by Denmark.

Konrad Niklewicz, Polish Presidency spokesperson at the European Union Council

Last updated: 28-12-2011