European Commission: Strategy Paper and Report 2003

Administrative preparations for enlargement

Ensuring a successful and smooth transition to an enlarged EU also requires preparations at the administrative level within the current EU Institutions. Such preparations have been underway for some time, to ensure that all necessary measures are in place by the date of accession. This ongoing work includes, inter alia, assessments of staffing needs and associated recruitment preparations, provision of translating and interpreting in additional languages, preparation of buildings, schools etc. The Institutions have been working together to ensure that such preparations are in place for each Institution. The Commission described the progress made on the tasks ahead in its Road Map for Administrative Preparations for Enlargement, which is based on the working hypothesis that ten acceding countries with nine additional languages will join on 1 January 2004. This roadmap will be updated once the decisions on the acceding countries and their date of accession have been taken.

In its Communication on Activities and Human Resources of the Commission in the Enlarged EU, the Commission identified in particular its additional human resource needs in terms of full-time posts, which should be phased-in from 2004 and be completed by around 2008. Moreover, it is clear that in certain policy areas such as agriculture, structural policies and the linguistic services, the human resource needs arising from enlargement will be high not only after but also immediately prior to accession. For this reason the Commission undertook a thorough assessment of its additional resource requirements which resulted in its request for 500 non-permanent posts already in 2003 to meet priority needs, mostly to be filled by nationals from candidate countries.