European Parliament staff statistics by nationality and grade

Earlier this year, the Spanish EU Council Presidency has written a letter to the Secretary General of the European Parliament, Klaus Welle, asking for detailed staff statistics of the European Parliament Secretariat in the same way as the EP wants these statistics from the Council.

One month later, Klaus Welle now has presented his answer: 7652 people work for the European Parliament secretariat (there are about 3400 people working for the Council Secretariat, see here).

And here is the breakdown of total staff figures by EU country (note that also other nationalities work in the EP!) ignoring the distribution by grade (see link above for the details):

Austrian - 98
Belgian - 955
British - 382
Bulgarian - 156
Cypriot - 28
Czech - 165
Danish - 185
Dutch - 230
Estonian - 105
Finnish - 219
French - 852
German - 656
Greek - 297
Hungarian - 210
Irish - 126
Italian - 703
Latvian - 114
Lithuanian - 125
Luxembourgish - 144
Maltese - 73
Polish - 320
Portuguese - 312
Romanian - 218
Slovak - 145
Slovenian - 117
Spanish - 503
Swedish - 184

Schengen statistics: We are looking for...

... things that have been stolen or lost, like

• 134 255 suspect banknotes;
• 341 675 blank documents;
• 348 353 firearms;
• 25 685 572 identification documents like passports;
• 3 889 098 cars.

... people, like

• 28 666 persons wanted for extradition;
• 736 868 persons who are not supposed to enter the Schengen area;
• 26 707 missing adults;
• 25 612 missing minors;
• 78 869 witnesses, persons summoned to appear before the judicial authorities in connection with criminal proceedings in order to account for acts for which they are being prosecuted, or persons who are to be served with a criminal judgement or a summons to report in order to serve a penalty involving deprivation of liberty;
• 32 571 persons that are observed because they committed crimes or are a threat to national security;
• 253 person that need to be observed secretly in order not to jeopardise the goal of the observation.

These statistics are from a Council document summarising the data in the Schengen Information System (SIS) database as of 01 January 2010.*

See also: How many people leave and enter the EU in a week?

*The legal background for this data is the Convention Implementing the Schengen Agreement (CISA) of 14 June 1985 (Articles 95-100) which can be found in the Schengen acquis.

Commission staff statistics: The gender gap

I just came across this lovely site with the Commission's staff statistics (via Dan Luca).

The blogger's instinct told to look into the sheets that separated gender and administrative grades, and it was immediately obvious that the institution heavily lobbying for gender equality has a massive gender gap in its upper ranks:

Only 2 out of 37 (5.4%) top administrative ranks (category AD16) in the European Commission are filled with females, and with 49 out of 235 (20.9%) for AD15 or 66 out of 431 (15.3%) for AD14 - these three ranks cover directors and directors-general - the next two ranks do not look very gender-balanced either.

I suppose somebody has some beautiful statistics how much better the situation has become over the last years, and I know that these upper ranks are filled with life-time officials which makes it hard to push for a rapid change, but what about credibility when it comes to the fight for gender equality, e.g. with regard to the new anti-discrimination directive, if the Commission cannot serve as a positive example?

And where are the Swedish Presidency and the European Parliament who should push the Commission on these issues?

The single peak: European Parliament elections online statistics

Florent from the European Parliament web editors is reporting about the post-electoral emptiness and the lack of interest they are experiencing now.

And it is clear: The interest in the EP elections has peaked on Sunday/Monday/Tuesday, when everyone was looking for results, and has then dropped sharply afterwards.

A very good impression of the importance of this peak gives the June statistic on the visitors to the EP 2009 election article on Wikipedia:

European Parliament elections 2009 (54): Rising interest in the European elections?

Wikipedia statistics for the English Wikipedia article on the 2009 EP elections show that visitors' numbers have doubled since December, making yesterday the best day so far (608 visitors).

It has been discussed before in this blog whether the Wikipedia statistics are a good measure, but the figures show at least that the attention level has been rising significantly compared to the last month(s) of 2008.

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Under the category "European parliament elections 2009" I am following up national and European activities on the path to the European Parliament elections 2009.

For an overview over all articles in this category have a look at the overview article.

For the five newest post see also the sidebar.

A Single Point of Contact for Comparable Statistics on Crime: Council discussions

I like to see Council documents that give an idea about discussions behind the scenes.

Today I found a document (published now, but issued in November) for the "Multidisciplinary Group on Organised Crime" in which discussions for setting up a "Single Point of Contact for Comparable Statistics on Crime" are summarised, indicating also the positions of member states.

Background is the following assessment:

[O]ne of the obstacles to producing comparable crime statistics at EU level was the absence, in many cases, of a single point of contact in the Member States, capable of meeting the various requests with a view to providing the necessary statistical data, regardless of whether those requests came from the Commission, Eurostat, Europol, Eurojust, or other international organisations. In many cases, that meant delays in dealing with questionnaires and requests, duplication and difficulties in collating data dispersed over different ministries and administrations. In other cases, points of contact did exist, but there were just as many ministries affected by this horizontal problem (Ministry of the Interior, Justice, etc.).

So now the question is whether member states want to set up one supranational contact point that would unite European statistics on crime.

Most of the countries, contrary to the statement above, seem to have respect national contact points, and they are now discussion about the pros and cons of setting up a European structure. 14 countries, at the time, had answered a short questionnaire:

We learn for example that Germany is the only country that is against the proposal, apparently because of its internal federal structure. Belgium and Latvia have some hesitations, inter alia because they see difficulties in actually producing comparable statistics. Nevertheless, most countries having replied see room for better co-ordination and thereby more efficient information flows and economy of resources through such a unified contact point.

Altogether, discussions seem to be very premature, but we get at least an idea on what level and with which arguments member states are discussing. At the end of the document, we also get a list of some national contact points for crime statistics, which might also be useful for some.