Some 1,500 specialists trained for Romania's takeover of EU Council presidency

Some 1,500 specialists have been trained for Romania's takeover of the presidency of the EU Council, Minister Delegate for European Affairs Victor Negrescu said on Thursday. 

"The training sessions started last year, with the support of the European Institute of Romania, the European Commission and of the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union. People have been trained, many of them have gone to the post, are already working at the Representation and, moreover, we have also brought human resources working at the level of the European institutions, people, mostly Romanians, who wanted to join us for this moment of preparing and the exercising the presidency," Negrescu said on B1 TV private broadcaster. 

He added that these specialists must be able to listen to all the views of the member states and come up with compromise solutions, consensual solutions that can be accepted by the member states. 

"The Presidency of the Council of the European Union does not imply that the country holding this mandate should tell others what to do, but it entails being able to mediate, listen to different points of view, generate consensus, and this effort implies this capacity for dialogue, this negotiation we have been developing a lot lately because, when we started this process, a year and a while ago, when I became a minister, I noticed that the specialists responsible for European affairs were no longer so in the public system, many going to the private sector or to the European institutions. We sought to re-build, on the one hand, creating appropriate departments in ministries, finding well-trained people in the ministries, also bringing capable people from outside the system and from European resources, and why not, recruiting new people who have come up with a new training to help the teams in the ministry involved in this process," the minister said. 

Victor Negrescu said that a presidency of the EU Council "is measured in the number of files it manages to close".