European Union institutions hunting for 50 legal experts

The European Personnel Selection Office (EPSO) is recruiting 51 Romanian legal experts for positions at European Union institutions.

Applicants are wanted for lawyer linguist positions, which pay monthly salaries starting at 5,000 euros. According to the advertisement posted by EPSO, candidates may apply for either of the two channels: the “Court of Justice” (35 vacancies) or the “Parliament, Council, Commission” (16 vacancies).

“It is a custom, an unwritten rule that every member state should have a number of civil servants with the EU institutions, which is proportionate with the population of each state in general,” said Leonard Orban, state secretary with the European Integration Ministry.

He said that the number of civil servants, either low or high-ranking, which Romania could have in the Parliament, Council, Commission and other European institutions, might number in the hundreds in two or three years.

According to the state secretary, despite the very rigorous demands, competition for such positions is quite fierce. Therefore he estimates about 100 people are competing for each position. However, even though the number of applicants is high, there are no guarantees that applicants can meet the level of competence expected for these positions.

“There are problems with filling the positions, especially those for high ranking civil servants, which require a great deal of training. Salaries are good, but demands are really high,” Orban said.

He added recruitment was currently targeting temporary positions (two-year contracts), because this was a much more comfortable solution than recruitment for permanent positions. The new positions require candidates to have an education that corresponds to at least four years of university education and a graduation degree in Romanian law. They will have to have the capacity to translate and proofread legislative and judicial texts, to the language of the contest, from at least two other languages than Romanian.

Language skills required are different for each of the two posts. Besides a very good command of Romanian, those applying for a position at the “Court of Justice” will have to speak French, as well as a third foreign language from the region, such as Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Latvian, Maltese or Slovenian.

The applicants to the “Parliament, Council, Commission” channel also have to speak two foreign languages. English is mandatory for the first foreign language while German and French are among the options for the second language.

Besides online application, those interested will also have to print and fill another application form from the EPSO website and mail it to the Office by May 22, 2006.

At the end of last year, EPSO recruited another 100 Romanians as conference interpreters, with the base salary of 3,837 euros.